Word for word

Pain can be wisdom's crucible

Times staff writer Paul de la Garza's meeting with five-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong didn't come off as either would have hoped.

Last year, Times staff writer Paul de la Garza wrote an article about meeting Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France champion - and, like de la Garza, a cancer survivor.

De la Garza was in the midst of painful treatment for Hodgkin's disease; he wanted to speak to Armstrong in hopes that the cyclist who survived testicular cancer might have some wisdom about how to get through the ordeal. The meeting took place at the White House. De la Garza (who now reports from Tampa) was a Washington correspondent and Armstrong was in town to see the president.

De la Garza - who is now in remission and doing well - wrote that he left the meeting feeling underwhelmed: Armstrong hadn't supplied the kind of wisdom he was looking for.

Now Armstrong has written his own account of the meeting. In his new book, Every Second Counts (Broadway Books, $24.95), he addresses the difficulty of being seen as a hero.

I'm not remarkable; I'm like anybody else, and if you catch me at the wrong time, I'm not good for much. As I was introduced to de la Garza, we were ushered into a small anteroom near the Blue Room to talk, but the White House was on a very strict schedule and the protocol was very clear. There wasn't a lot of time, and I was nervous over the prospect of meeting with the president. I tried to listen as I was given some things to sign, posters and magazines.

De la Garza began to ask me some very specific questions about his cancer, what to do, what not to do. I fumbled for replies. I didn't have the $64,000 answer for every cancer question, but I gave him my standard one, which I believe to my core: Find the best doctors you can, and trust the hell out of them.

How do I survive this? he asked.

I answered, honestly, "Listen to your doctors. Get the very best treatment."

But that advice, as he put it later in an article he wrote about the experience, was "not exactly an epiphany."

His left arm was hurting, his veins were burning, and other parts of his body were rebelling against the treatment. But the main part of him that was rebelling was his mind. He had seven chemo treatments left, and he was getting weaker with each one. I knew exactly what he was experiencing - the nausea, and the taste of tin in the roof of his mouth. I could still smell the stuff myself. He was demoralized, and he had come to meet me hoping for something more.

"How do I survive when I can't stand the thought of another IV in my arm?" he asked.

"The misery is part of getting better," I said. "You have to welcome it."

What I meant was this: misery is the cure. You must embrace it, because it's what may save you. You can alter any experience with your mind - it's up to you to determine what the quality of each moment is. Concentration and belief can make even chemo, no matter how sickening it is, a positive experience. It takes practice, but it's possible. I used to tell myself, when I threw up or when it burned so badly to urinate, that the sensations represented the cancer leaving my body. . . . I wasn't going to dwell on whether I was going to die. There were those in medicine and those outside it who thought I would die - but I chose to be around doctors and nurses who believed I could make it.

I should have told all of these things to Paul de la Garza. Or maybe I'd have been better off just sympathizing with his plight and telling him this simple, stark truth: Yeah, cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me - but I don't want to do it again.

Instead, all I said was, "When the treatment is over, you bounce back quick. At least, I did."

Then a White House staffer interrupted us and I was ushered into the Blue Room for my brief address with the president. De la Garza was left in the anteroom, clearly disappointed in our meeting.

"That was it," he wrote.

He was right; heroism is impossible to fulfill - the bar is too high. If some people want a revelatory experience, I can't answer the request. More often than not, a hero is a person who acts without thinking, anyway. If 10 people, or a million people, want to say that you're a hero, the only thing you can do is say thank you, just keep going about your day, and understand that trying to be a hero is not the most useful purpose you can serve.

The most useful purpose I can serve is to tell people who are suffering that it's an absolutely important human experience to be ill, that it can change how you live, and that it can change other lives, too.

Sometimes I'm successful in imparting the message, and sometimes I'm not. I wasn't so successful with de la Garza.

- To read Paul de la Garza's Sept. 27, 2002, essay about meeting Lance Armstrong, please click on www.sptimes.com/armstrong

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