Every Day I Fight: Making a Difference, Kicking Cancer's Ass - Softcover

Scott, Stuart; Platt, Larry

 
9781101983171: Every Day I Fight: Making a Difference, Kicking Cancer's Ass
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101983175 ISBN 13: 9781101983171
Verlag: Blue Rider Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer.  You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and the manner in which you live.” – Stuart Scott

The fearless, intimate, and inspiring story behind ESPN anchor Stuart Scott’s unrelenting fight against cancer, with a foreword by Robin Roberts.

Shortly before he passed away, on January 4, 2015, Stuart Scott completed work on this memoir. It was both a labor of love and a love letter to life itself. Not only did Stuart relate his personal story—his childhood in North Carolina, his supportive family, his athletic escapades, his on-the-job training as a fledgling sportscaster, his being hired and eventual triumphs at ESPN—he shared his intimate struggles to keep his story going. Struck by appendiceal cancer in 2007, Stuart battled this rare disease with an unimaginable tenacity and vigor. Countless surgeries, enervating chemotherapies, endless shuttling from home to hospital to office and back—Stuart continued defying fate, pushing himself through exercises and workout routines that kept him strong. He wanted to be there for his teenage daughters, Sydni and Taelor, not simply as their dad, but as an immutable example of determination and courage.

Every Day I Fight is a saga of love, an inspiration to us all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Scott was an anchor and commentator for ESPN’s SportsCenter. He was the lead host for the NBA on ESPN and ABC, as well as a host on Monday Night Football since that program moved to ESPN in 2006. His unique style and vocabulary made him one of the network’s most popular and recognized anchors.  He won the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the 2014 ESPY Awards. He died in January 2015.

 

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INTRODUCTION
 
WHY I FIGHT
 
My phone was blowing up. The text messages were coming nonstop, and, with each one, I was feeling more and more like an imposter. There were hundreds of them, almost all using words like “courageous,” “brave,” “inspirational.”

Only I felt like none of those things. No, the only thing I felt, the only thing I’ve ever felt since the day in 2007 I learned that what I thought was appendicitis was actually a rare form of cancer, was . . . fear. To readers of that morning’s New York Times, I may have seemed courageous. But trust me: I ain’t courageous. I just don’t want to die.

The article, on this March day in 2014, was headlined “A Story of Perseverance: ESPN Anchor’s Private Battle with Cancer Becomes a Public One” and it had all the background. It had the three surgeries that had removed my appendix, large intestine, some lymph nodes, other organs; the fifty-eight infusions of chemotherapy I’d undergone to that point; the Wound VAC that drained the foot-long scar that ran from chest to belly button and that had taken two months to heal after a ten-hour surgery in the fall of 2013. And it had me wearing a black “Everyday I Fight” T-shirt at the mixed martial arts studio near my Connecticut home, where I go straight from chemotherapy to jab and hook and kick until I collapse, drained.

But that’s not courage. That’s survival. When cancer storms into your life, you have a choice: fight, or curl up and just be a cancer patient. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my moments. There are times when I say to myself, It’s too much, I don’t have the energy for this fight. There are times I bawl my eyes out and tell my girlfriend, Kristin, who has slept on a cot by my bedside throughout countless hospital stays, “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” I come from jockdom; what guy likes being that vulnerable? I have many such moments, but they’re not the last moment I have. And they’re not my most enduring moments.

Because having cancer, it turns out, is more complicated than you’d think. Like any great opponent, cancer is in your face. It practices the art of intimidation. It gets inside your head and messes with your thinking. It takes its toll on you physically, but the real burden is mental. I’ve told my doctors I don’t want to know my prognosis: “I’m not interested in hearing how long you think I might have.” That would be just another thing to be frightened of and obsess over.

But let’s keep this real. I’m forty-nine. There’s a good chance I’m going to die a helluva lot earlier than I ever wanted to. There’s a good chance I’m going to die soon. And I know it. I know it every moment of every day. And that reality is never not with me.

So this book is a chronicle of my fight against cancer, but it’s even more than that. It’s really a memoir of a life well fought; in sports, the media, or the cancer ward, the one true thing I’ve learned is that life is hard but that there is redemption in the struggle.

Cancer is just the latest, and most terrifying, fight. Though I hate this most unwanted of companions, I respect it for its power—and there are even times when I’m grateful for what it’s given me. Don’t get me wrong: From day one, I was committed to beating it. But along the way, I’ve learned how paradoxical the relationship between patient and disease really is; cancer turns the old cliché on its head. It can kill you and make you stronger, all at the same time.

That’s why words like “brave” don’t really apply when confronting cancer. When you first hear that you have it—a doctor prefaced breaking the news to me by saying, “Things just got more complicated”—you say to yourself: I’m going to die. And, in my case, the very next thought was even more of a sledgehammer: I won’t be here for my two daughters. After a while, once the sting subsides, you ask yourself: How do I fight cancer?

Here’s what I knew about cancer: You get it, you die. But I’d always been a competitive sonofabitch. I turned down a couple of football scholarships out of high school to attend my dream school, the University of North Carolina, where I was friendly with Michael Jordan before he was the greatest who ever lived; I planned on being a walk-on wide receiver there, but an eye disease, keratoconus, ended my collegiate career before it began. As a sports broadcaster debuting on ESPN in the early nineties, I brought the in-your-face attitude of the music I came up on— hip-hop—to SportsCenter. That wasn’t a planned thing; it was just who I was. Yeah, I’m young, I’m African-American, and I’m telling you about this game like I’m talking trash with my boys back home: “Man, Mike about to put it on these boys! Mike about to mess them up!” Even my most famous catchphrase—Boo-yah!— was all about capturing those adrenaline-fueled moments of intimidation in sports.

Yet behind the on-air bravado was a craftsman; I actually kept a running chart of how many statistics colleagues like Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, and Chris “Boomer” Berman used in their broadcasts because I was determined to lead the nation in giving the audience cold, hard facts behind the loudness. You could hate me for my style, but my substance was going to be beyond reproach.

On the football field or the TV set, the only way I knew how to succeed was to push myself, to be stronger than my opponent, to work harder. But now there I was, forty-two years old, and the opponent before me was a freakin’ assassin. How do you work harder than cancer? I didn’t know. But when I want to work hard, I go to the gym. After my first four-hour chemo treatment, I was hooked up to a two-day chemo drip in a little bag that attached to a port in my stomach—and thirty minutes later, I was in the gym. On the elliptical machine, I looked down and noticed the name of the medicine dripping into my body: It was called fluorouracil, or 5-FU for short.

I smiled, said a little prayer, and then stuck that pack into the pocket of my gym shorts and said to myself: FU, cancer. The athlete in me realized: This thing growing inside me was trying to kick my ass. Well, I’ve gotta hit first and kick its ass. So I attacked the elliptical and made a promise to myself: From then on, I’d be working out within thirty minutes of each chemo treatment. Later, I’d skip the gym—there were too many inquiries about my health; they were well-meaning, but we members of the alternative universe that is CancerWorld chuckle at the overly earnest, stage-whispered “how you feeling” queries meant to convey deep concern—and instead I started doing P90X or mixed martial arts in the living room of my house. From day one, working out was my own private “FU” to cancer.

Because cancer is trying to rob the most precious thing in the world to me: time with my daughters, Sydni, fifteen, and Taelor, nineteen. They’re why I say “FU” to cancer every day. When I have those moments—when I say to myself, This is too hard, I’m too tired to go on—I remind myself that cancer forced me to reconsider my life’s goal and that I haven’t reached it yet: I want to walk Taelor and Sydni down the aisle. I don’t want them with an uncle or some father figure; that’s my place.

I hate that a...

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Verlag
Blue Rider Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101983175
ISBN 13 
9781101983171
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@phaidon.com
gpsr@phaidon.com

Zähringerstraße 24
Berlin
10707
Deutschland

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