To find happiness, turn losses into wins

I already had a lot of practice at turning losses into wins in my life, but this was a challenge I wasn’t sure I could overcome. By my third round of chemo, I didn’t think I possessed the strength of character to overcome my cancer and was ready to call it quits.

Like a runner in the Boston Marathon, I had hit the wall. That third round was my Heartbreak Hill, the incline at the twentieth mile that was breaking my spirit to the point of wanting to quit. More than that, I told myself that I was ready to die. That’s what cancer does to you. It wants to break you down, tricks you into giving up just as the chemo has the cancer dying off and on its last legs. But at that later stage of chemo, it is not the cancer making you weak, but rather your chemical healing agent sapping you of energy while it beats down the cancer cells one by one. I made it through that third round on fumes and survived the fourth round only because I knew it was my last.

By the end of the last round of chemo, the doctors found no evidence that the cancer had spread, and the tumor in my abdomen that just three months earlier had swelled to double the size of a grapefruit had shrunk to the size of a golf ball.

Six weeks later, surgeons removed the remaining tumor, along with my cancerous testicle, leaving me with thirty-eight staples down the middle of my body. Although the surgery rendered my ability to father children uncertain (and assured me that I would never win a swimsuit competition), it also cut out the cancer ... so far.

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Challenges can be a gift
I live every day knowing that today might be the day that my cancer returns. But rather than look at this as a horrific cross to bear, I call it my gift, a constant reminder of just how lucky I am to be healthy and alive. After all, what is joy without sorrow? What is success without failure? What is a win without a loss? What is health without illness? You have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. There is always going to be suffering. It’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.

This truth was evident to me not only in the hospital but also on the ice. Without the humiliations, the losses, and the failures, the success I had in skating would have meant very little. Likewise, fighting cancer brought me tremendous pain, fear, anxiety, despair, and loneliness, and to come through that has given me an amazing perspective that reminds me of how precious and fragile life is. It allows me to appreciate the day. It is an odd blessing, and not one that I would ever choose, yet it is an amazingly powerful force that enhances my life. It is what survivors call the “gift” of cancer. Any challenge — be it romantic, physical, job-related, athletic, mental, financial — can also serve as a gift if we allow it to. Illness, like any setback, poses great challenges and immense rewards. It allows us to come in contact with a part of our being that we never would know existed without that battle.

I am no longer haunted by the image of swimming up to the surface and gasping for air, only to be sucked back down so I have to swim twice as hard to get back up to the top again. It’s never too late to learn the lesson that every apparent curse comes with a blessing. It wasn’t until I was forty-three years old and listening to a thirteen-year-old speak her truth that I realized my various roadblocks in life had been detours into a better direction.

This divinely scripted pattern goes back to the very beginning of my life when I was an unwanted pregnancy and was adopted by my parents. I went from being somebody’s unwanted orphan to being a prized child who couldn’t have had more love showered upon him. Then I suffered through my childhood illness, eventually discovering skating and being healed. Whenever I lost, I would find a way to win. I find that for every unbelievably horrible price I had to pay in life, something followed that was an equally great reward for responding to things the way I did.

Before Shawna’s inspiring speech, rather than looking forward to the next challenge, I would dread it — despite the fact that things always worked out better for me in the end, that for every curse, there was a phenomenal blessing.

Excerpted from “The Great Eight” by Scott Hamilton with Ken Baker. Copyright (c) 2008, reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson.

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