Brain tumors won't stop him

---

Sunday, September 20, 1998

BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

John Kapoor watches one of his cross country teammates practice. (Yoni Pozner photo) | ZOOM |

Why do we run?

What are we looking for when we put on the jogging shoes or the three-piece suit or the hard hat? What do we want?

We run through life to prove things to ourselves and to others. We run because everyone else does, and if we don't, we'll fall behind.

We run to things and away from things, but we never stand still. Life is a race. Maybe we're conditioned to believe that. So we run. Maybe that's it.

Or maybe it's as simple as the satisfaction of putting one foot in front of the other, no matter what.

I am running in an Anderson Township park with John Kapoor. I am running slowly enough my feet seem to be treading air. I could walk at the same pace. It's effortless.

John is next to me. He breathes heavily after a few hundred yards. He was sick with a high fever the day before. John has a plastic, form-fitted brace on his right foot that extends above his ankle, to keep the foot pointed straight ahead. His right arm dangles at his side.

Every so often, John veers off course to the right, bumping me as we run. He always apologizes. Every time. His cross country coach at Anderson High, Andy Wolf, says of John's workouts this year, "It's a lot harder for him now. Some days we gauge the workout by how many times he falls down."

We are running around a large field and down a gravel path. John's breathing is labored. I fear for his balance. "Anytime you want to stop, we can," I say.

John doesn't stop. John runs. Down the path, up a hill through the grass, practically sideways, listing to the right, his right side barely working. We finish. Four-tenths of a mile. John runs it by the force of his will.

John Kapoor share a laugh with teammates. (Yoni Pozner photo) | ZOOM |

He was a pretty good distance runner some years ago, before the first tumor appeared in his brain to vandalize his youth. He'd run sixth or seventh man on his junior high team; his identical twin brother Michael was third or fourth. But the difference between them wasn't much.

John always worked hard, always showed up ready to run, always did his best. Five, six miles a day. This has not changed, except the distance, even as one tumor was removed, only to be replaced by another and then a third. Even as John endured surgeries and staph infections and radiation and chemotherapy.

Even now, as the third tumor lives in the left side of his brain, and his parents and his doctors have decided not to remove it surgically. "They've opened his head up so many times," explains his mother Kathleen. The tumors have all been benign, which is a good thing, if you can consider anything about a brain tumor to be good.

Even now, John runs. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Never backward.

The other day, Andy Wolf said to John, "John, as long as you get up as many times as you fall down, you're not behind."

Do you believe people are put here to teach us how to live better? That they are chosen to show us how to run?

Michael, John's older sibling by exactly 10 minutes, said, "John has made me want to persevere more, keep fighting. I won't let anything get me down, because my brother won't."

Keener sense of life

It started in English class nearly four years ago. John was giving a speech. And then he wasn't. He just stopped, in mid-thought, eyes straight ahead. The book he was holding fell from his hand to the floor.

It happened more than once. Kathleen Kapoor worried, because that is what mothers do. She went to the hardware store and bought a kit to test for radon in their house. She took John to doctors, who suggested he might be epileptic.

They asked questions. Had he suffered any head injuries when he was little? Had he been in a serious car accident?

No and no again. So what is it?

The lapses in speech continued. John saw more doctors. The day before his 13th birthday, John underwent an EEG. A brain scan. Doctors discovered a tumor the size of a pea.

Since then, the Kapoors' emotions have been around the world and back. After the second surgery, a doctor who believed the tumor was malignant said to Kathleen, "Start praying for John."

To love someone with a disability is to own a keener sense of possibilities, limitations, joys, sorrows and perspective. It is at once the best and worst part of your life.

"We thought after that first surgery, he would be fine," Kathleen says. "It has been continuous. You don't ever get used to it."

Says John, sitting across the living room of their home, "I get used to it."

I ask Kathleen if there is light yet.

"We haven't seen it," she says. "We're still hoping and praying it will come."

"We'll see it," Michael says.

"I always believe," John says. "Some people really don't believe."

"No, no," Kathleen says. "We all believe. We all have hope."

New challenges

This is what John has had to do in the nine months since the latest tumor was discovered: Take chemotherapy, orally and intravenously; learn to write with his left hand; attend physical, speech and occupational therapy.

Try tying your shoes with one hand. Try cutting a steak. Try articulating what is in your brain when your mouth won't let you. John has a 3.6 grade-point at Anderson. He's a member of the National Honor Society. Yet, his speech is bumpy and groggy. He fills his sentences with "likes" and "ums" because his brain can't process his thoughts quickly enough.

Try running the way John runs now, after you've spent your whole life running the way John used to run.

Imagine the frustration, the sadness, the desperation, the dread. John would. If he had the time.

"We're past the dread," Michael says. "John doesn't have bad days."

Thanks to John, neither does Michael. With twins, the sharing never stops.

"I'd be a lot different if John wasn't around. His jovial attitude makes me a lot happier," Michael says.

He recalls coming into John's room in the middle of the night when they were small, asking to sleep in the spare bed because he was afraid of kidnappers. He recalls the afternoon Kathleen locked herself out of the house. While she fretted for the safety of her two 4-year-olds, they were in the kitchen, raiding the pantry of bananas and graham crackers.

Michael thinks about his part in all of this: "Sometimes I wonder, since we are twins and we are really alike, if it's something genetic, why him and not me?"

Falling, getting up

It's not all bad. In fact, very little beyond the physical concerns is bad. The central irony is that the Kapoors have done everything but run from the bump in John's road. As for John, he has run right at it. And never stopped.

"Since the beginning, I thought, "This is how it's going to be, and that's OK,' " John says.

In the beginning, after the first tumor was found, Vik Kapoor took his third-oldest son to Ellis Island in New York harbor. Vik came to New York from India in 1969. He had an image of America from the books he had read in school. America was "a place where a dream could be realized if you worked hard and smart and rejoiced in other people's success," he says.

Vik had $7 in his pocket. Today, he designs computer chips. He is the dean of the college of engineering at the University of Toledo. He makes $165,000 a year.

Four years ago, Vik took John to see where Vik had gotten off the boat. He showed his son a register where he had signed his name. He said, "This (disease) is God-given. You have to move on. You can achieve despite difficulties. You have determination and a strong heart."

John says the brace doesn't hurt his foot. We're running again, a little less steadily than before, another four-tenths of a mile from here to there. The brace makes him even more determined to be the runner he once was. "Faster and better," he says.

I trot beside John, slower than before. I'm somewhere between anxiety for him (will he fall? Am I going too fast?) and worry that if I ask him how he's doing or if I slow to a walk, I'll embarrass him. It's my problem, not his. John finishes the four-tenths of a mile. John runs.

Andy Wolf, the coach Vik Kapoor calls "a father in absentia" (Vik and Kathleen are divorced), says, "He won't give an inch. He won't ask for an inch. You can't find a hound dog more faithful. John keeps running, falling down and getting up."

"What do you hope for him?" I ask Wolf.

"What do I hope? I hope someday I have John's son on my team," Wolf says.

A hero to remind us

John wants to go to Purdue next year. He wants to be a pharmacist, but there is much to be done before then. John's goal now, what he thinks about as he circles the grass and gravel of the park, is to run in the Queen City Conference meet Oct. 17. He won't do it unless he feels he's able; he's no charity case.

As Wolf says, "This is not a kid with a problem who wants to be an athlete. This is an athlete who has a problem."

"Are you a hero?" I ask John.

"Now that you mention it, I'm just a regular person," he says. "An average schmoe," Michael says.

"Yeah."

No true hero assumes he is one. The genuine article practices his heroism the way a monk practices his celibacy. Before John Kapoor could run eight-tenths of a mile with me, twice around the park, a teammate helped him tie his shoes.

We are fortunate there is no cancer of the heart, no cure for optimism, no tumor of the spirit.

We're lucky to have people who remind us of that.

And this is why we run.

Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.

DAUGHERTY ARCHIVE