To find happiness, turn losses into wins

The speaker before me was a thirteen-year-old named Shawna Culp. Shawna, a competitive athlete, had lost a leg to cancer, but she confidently stepped up to the podium with a prosthetic right leg and barely a limp. She had a shock of red hair and an absolute glow to her. I stopped my nervous pacing and listened to this charismatic young woman.

Shawna spoke into the microphone and told the audience, “The worst thing that ever happened to me is cancer. The best thing that ever happened to me is cancer.”

From the rear of the room, I could see just about everyone nodding their heads in agreement, connecting to her seemingly paradoxical statement. The place burst into applause.

There I stood, totally blown away by her words, by her incredible survivor’s story. I was touched not just by that profound statement, but by everything that she shared that day — about the devastation initially of not being able to play sports, of losing her gorgeous head of hair, of having her childhood innocence ripped from her by cancer. But then she also told how she turned all those curses into the greatest teachers of the meaning of life, how cancer made her a better athlete, a better human being. In a five-minute speech that was probably the first of her life, she touched me in a powerful way.

Within a few years of that speech in Chicago, Shawna went on to play on the US Women’s Wheelchair Basketball team as well as other competitive sports. She didn’t sit around and mope about her tragedies. Instead, she turned cancer into the most positive force in her life. As of this writing, her cancer is still in remission. Shawna not only won that cancer battle, but she won the war that I hadn’t yet won — that is, the war my mind was still waging with itself.

I don’t even remember what I said to the group that day. What’s for sure is that it was nowhere near as profound as Shawna’s message. From that day on, I looked at what I believed to be “curses” as blessings, and I now realize that the ability to do so makes one a champion more than landing a perfect triple lutz does.

I had applied this outlook to my skating with some success. But when it came to my personal life, I had wallowed in self-pity. If I suffered a sore groin, I would look at it as a challenge, a positive motivation to overcome the pain and focus even more on winning. If I had stumbled on a landing, then during my next performance, I would see to it that I skated twice as well to make up for the error. I tried to live by Eric Heiden’s wisdom — remembering that it wasn’t the circumstances that defined me but my response to them — and it brought me gold medals and accolades and worldwide celebrity.

But while sports can be a great laboratory of life, it also is merely a dress rehearsal for real life. I had a hard time applying those principles to my off-ice reality.

A new battle to fight
In the spring of 1997, I was starring in the national tour of Stars on Ice and had started feeling lethargic, nauseous, and just not quite myself. My stomach hurt constantly, like a torn abdominal muscle that just wouldn’t heal and no amount of ibuprofen could alleviate. So I had some tests done, and on St. Patrick’s Day as I lay in the emergency room at St. Francis Medical Center, resting my exhausted body before a performance in Peoria, Illinois, the results came back:

I had some form of cancer. Dr. Jon Carroll said, “We have found a mass. We don’t know if it is benign or malignant. If it were me, I would take care of this right away.” Two days later at the Cleveland Clinic, I was diagnosed with stage three germ-cell testicular cancer and a tumor twice the size of a grapefruit growing in my abdomen.

I began my cancer battle with the kind of positive focus that I had practiced on the ice all those years. I broke it down like a challenging and complex program that needed to be perfected, and I was determined to win. This was my new battle to fight. I took leave from the skating tour and headed straight to my arena of choice: Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic.

The diagnosis brought back memories of my mother and how she bravely fought through her breast cancer with strength, humor, and dignity. I was just a teenager when she was diagnosed, and I watched her battle for three years before the cancer spread and finally took her at age forty-nine in the spring of 1977. She was working, going to school to earn her master’s degree, and raising three children, while going through chemotherapy. I was a year out of high school, amid my quest to make the Olympic team, and her death absolutely devastated me. But some twenty years later, my mother’s attitude — I will fight this cancer to the death! — now inspired me.

Mother set a great example, and I wanted to use every memory I had of her battle in my struggle. Even though she didn’t win hers, I was determined to win mine. With the advancements in cancer treatments over the past twenty years, I knew that at least I would have the fighting chance that she never did.

A week after the diagnosis, I was a patient at the world-famous clinic, beginning three months of intensive chemotherapy done in four rounds — five days on, sixteen days off; five days on, sixteen days off — until the chemicals destroyed the cancer cells. The doctors told me if my body could survive the chemical potion coursing through it over the repeated rounds, I had a fairly good chance of surviving. But, by the third round, I was ready to quit.

The treatment — daily IV injections of basically poison — was ravaging my body. Within a matter of a few weeks, I had gone from being in what I thought was the best shape of my life, performing in front of thousands of people every night and being surrounded by friends and my Stars on Ice family, to not having the energy to press the power button on the TV remote control in my hospital room. I was filled with chemicals that made all the hair on my body fall out. I was bloated and sick and worn down like never before in my life.

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