Monday, July 26, 1999
Armstrong proves cancer can be outrun
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
I called my friend Finnerty at 5 Sunday afternoon and told him to turn on the TV. “You've got to watch this,” I said.
The American Lance Armstrong was on a bicycle, gliding across the French countryside on his way to the Champs Elysees in Paris, where he would cross the finish line to the cheers of thousands, the winner of the Tour de France. It was a joyride for Armstrong, in every sense.
Armstrong and Finnerty have something in common: Cancer. Armstrong has beaten testicular cancer so severe that less than three years ago, one of his doctors gave him a 50-50 chance to live. Finnerty was diagnosed on Memorial Day with cancer of the liver and pancreas and told his time was “six weeks to six months.”
People who have watched Armstrong's recovery from a disease that spread to his abdomen and brain and deposited golf ball-sized tumors on his lung call it a miracle. Some of us are hoping with all we have that Finnerty will earn what Armstrong owns. We're hoping they wind up with two things in common.
“You gotta watch this,” I said again.
Every day is a blessing
Cancer survivors live to show us what hope and courage look like. They are the faces of perspective and balance, so it should not have surprised me when I called Finnerty Sunday that he would be the one making me feel better.
“A true mid-life crisis,” he called his cancer. He is 47, a salesman, a West Chester resident, the father of two football-playing sons. “This is not one of those dye-the-gray, get-your-convertible and chase-the-blonde things.”
He had no family history. He was asymptomatic. He walked into the doctor with a blocked tube that led from his liver. He'll never be the same again.
Finnerty takes medicine, some traditional, some not, every four hours. He goes to chemotherapy for an hour on Fridays and makes the older patients laugh awhile. He has maintained his grace, his dignity and his sense of humor. He is neither accepting nor fatalistic about the disease. But he has reached an understanding that God will do with him what he wants.
“I've said to God, give me four or five years. Let me get my kids out of school and married. That's a good, long time. Anything beyond that is a blessing,” Finnerty said, before pausing. “Actually, every day is a blessing.”
I tell him to turn on the TV.
There are second chances
Lance Armstrong was so surrounded by cameras and cars and well-wishers, he could barely find the finish line. It was a 2,300-mile race that lasted 22 days, but Armstrong had clinched the win a few days ago. Sunday was for celebrating and remembering nothing is impossible.
He'd had two surgeries, one to remove a testicle, the other to remove brain lesions. He'd had 12 weeks of chemotherapy. “I was given things that can kill you,” Armstrong said, so it must have struck him as ironic that French journalists would accuse him last week of using drugs to enhance his performance.
Someone asked Armstrong what the significance of his winning was. It was one of those nebulous, unanswerable questions we journalists try, when nothing else is obvious.
Armstrong said, “We can be told we have a 90 percent (survival) chance, a 50 percent chance or a 1 percent chance,” he said. “But as long as you take that chance and want to live... I'm living proof we get second chances, and second chances are better than the first.”
I hope Finnerty had the TV on.
“I would never in a thousand years think I would get this,” he'd said to me. “Hopefully, I'll kick this and be declared cancer-free in a year. I'll have a party and you'll be invited.”
I told Finnerty I wouldn't miss it. Not for anything.
Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.
Tour de France coverage from Associated Press
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