Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World [NOOK Book]

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I suppose I've always been a climber. From trees to hills to arbors to piles of debris, if there was something higher than ground level and I was awake, you could pretty much find me on top of it.

Walking down the baby-blue hallway that late January day in 1988, I turned left and entered the Willard Junior High School gymnasium on the balls of my feet and without a care in the world.

There was a stage with a small workout room to the right, and the pegboards I usually climbed directly in front of me on the left wall. Typically, I would already be scrambling up there, the pegs solid and comforting in my hands as I reached ever higher, scaling up to the ceiling and back a few times before a friend or two told me it was time to get to our next class.

For some reason, we weren't allowed to climb the pegboard that day. Who knows why? Perhaps it was closed for repairs, or maybe the teacher watching the gym that day didn't want to get the pegs for us. Either way, it looked like my climbing fix would have to wait until the next day.

Instead, I picked up a game of basketball with some other friends. My new Nike high-tops squeaked across the varnished gym floor as I drove for the basket. Squeak. Turn. Squeak. Pivot. Squeak-squeak. It was music to my ears, and much more than the mere sound of rubber on hardwood floor; it was the sound of basketball itself.

Sweat, clean and clear, dripped off my nose as my chest burned from lugging the ball up one end of the court and back down the other. We'd been taking our time, hotdogging it for the smattering of Madonna wannabes lined up against the gym wall, but now it was put-up-or-shut-up time.

"Come on, Sean," shouted a red-faced opponent, pissed because his team was down by six points, "lunch period's almost over. Shoot already!"

I smiled, gave him the finger with my free hand, and drove the ball with my other. It smacked against the floor, solid and right, traveling back to my long fingers as if magnetized. It followed me where I went, left, right, defying the laws of gravity and physics, always finding my hand no matter how far I'd run up-court.

I shucked, I jived, I zigged, I zagged until at last the basket was in plain sight. I flew through their defenders, a lackluster group of pudgy kids playing hooky from shop class, and stole toward the basket with my buddies playing defense the whole way there.

There was Jerry, my neighbor and longtime sleepover pal, whose dad had the best dirty-magazine collection this side of the Cuyahoga River. There was Scott, who always had a stick of gum in his mouth and a smartass answer for the teacher. How could I forget Andy, who had the hottest sister in town and never let me forget it, either.

Jerking forward with the ball, I was closing in for an easy layup and a quick two points for our team. The squeaking followed me, an angry half-dozen defenders all trying to catch up, but I was too fast for them. I'd always been too fast. Just as my feet left the ground, a grossly audible snap came from my left knee.

I heard it before I felt it, and neither the sound nor the sensation was pleasant. Think King Arthur ripping off a turkey leg in every old Knights of the Round Table movie you've ever seen, gristle tearing and flesh loosing and the empty, hollow thwock of joint leaving joint: That was the sound and the sensation. I tumbled to the hardwood floor with a thump, holding my leg, rolling around on the ground in pain as the game came to an abrupt halt.

My bare elbows and shins sang out in pain as they smacked against the hardwood floor, me writhing to and fro as I reached for my offended knee, flinging sweat from my hair as I shook my head, pain and frustration contorting my features into an unrecognizable mask.

This can't be happening, I remember thinking. I had two easy points, right there on the board. We could have shut them out!

Then all was dark. There are a few lost minutes in my memory — either I passed out or freaked out or both. The next thing I remember is my buddies picking me up. The looks on their faces said it all: This was bad. The game was over, the grimy shop kids trading high fives and smug glances as they watched me hobble to my feet.

I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. I tried to brush off the injury and keep playing, but the pain forced me to totter over to the stage and sit out for the rest of the period before hobbling to my science class, an athlete in his prime benched over by the Bunsen burners, taking notes instead of signing autographs.

After struggling through the rest of the day, limping from class to class, I was relieved to hear the bell signaling the day was finally over. Next came the long trek home. I sighed and gathered the books from my locker that I'd need for homework that night. Then I tucked them under my arm and started off for home.

I don't remember much of that walk from school, except trying to talk myself out of the pain. It's nothing, I remember telling myself, limping along like Frankenstein, dragging my left leg to keep up with my right. Walk it off, Sean. Isn't that what Coach would say? Walk it off.

I walked it off, all right, but it wasn't easy. By the time I got home, my knee had swollen to roughly the size of a grapefruit and looked horribly discolored, as if someone had taken aim and splattered it with black, yellow, and blue paintballs. Think bruise, then think bruise in 3-D Technicolor. Then plug it in. That was my knee. My mom took one look at it and called the local doctor.

It was a simple thing, really, something any mom would do for her son. But that call signaled the beginning of the end of life as I knew it. By picking up the phone and dialing those seven simple digits, my mom had effectively sentenced me to several years of pain, fear, depression, rage, self-pity, and, finally, triumph.

Then again, if she hadn't made the call, the sentence would have been far worse.

In the span of one pickup-basketball game, I had gone from a typical middle school student to a walking — make that a limping — science experiment. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. Not Dr. Rosso, the family physician my mom called that day, a tidy middle-aged man who was used to treating sore throats and tummyaches and not fruit-sized limbs. Not the knee specialist in Mansfield, Ohio, to whom he referred us.

I spent the rest of that afternoon alternating between waiting rooms and doctors' offices, reading months-old Highlights magazines, favoring my right leg and answering a lot of questions that didn't add up to much. The knee specialist couldn't do an X-ray because my swollen knee wouldn't fit in his machine, and all I got from the glorified immobilizer cast he gave me was a lot of attention from my mom, dad, and younger brother, Seth.

The rest of that afternoon and evening, I could barely keep my eyes open at the dinner table, and that was after taking a nap. Right after dinner, it was straight to bed, and that was the first night I ever understood what people meant when they said they were asleep before their head hit the pillow.

The next thing I knew, my mom was shaking me awake, and sun was streaming through my bedroom window. She said that I had slept through my alarm clock — another first — but that was one of many I was in store for on that grim day of days.

Suddenly, my mom called my dad into the room. By the time I fully woke up, they were both hovering above me, staring down with eyes wide open and mouths agape, as if I'd been disfigured in a horrible car accident.

I might as well have been: Every single joint in my body had swollen to the point that my mom and dad later told me they thought they were looking at the Pillsbury Doughboy. I was all flesh and fluid, ringlets of bright pink skin swollen to bursting at my elbows, knees, wrists, ankles, you name it; if two bones met, my young, elastic skin was shiny and swollen.

They didn't even recognize their own son lying in his bed.

Bed. That was where I'd be spending much of the next four days, at the local hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses, all of them wanting something from me: blood, urine, stool samples, my temperature, more blood, more samples. A throat culture here, a swab there, a pinprick here, a tube there. On and on and on it went, time passing in increments of plastic trays and empty vials, cute nurses and those not so cute.

There was no time to enjoy missing school, no time to thank the visitors who paraded in and out, no time to answer the get-well cards and bouquets of flowers that stood sentinel over me that week. There was only the fear of the unknown: What did I have, and how was I going to get rid of it?

After I'd spent four days lying on my back in that hospital bed, being poked, prodded, and tested, the doctor came to talk to my family. Dr. Rosso, who'd originally suggested I see a knee specialist and now realized that the knee was the least of my worries, pulled my mom and dad out into the hallway to ask them a question.

A question that, once they shared it with me, would resonate with me for the rest of my life: "Teri, Scott," he said hesitantly, a sigh escaping his thin, dry lips, "do you know of any good oncologists?"

At the time I had no idea what an oncologist was, but rest assured, my mom and dad sure did. They broke down and started crying, and that was when I knew something wasn't right. This wasn't pneumonia or the measles or anything else I could put a name to. Mom and Dad went for a walk down the hallway to gather themselves before coming back into my room.

I watched them come at me, their shoes squeaking on the heavily varnished hospital floors. It seemed to take them forever, as if they were dragging their feet. Squeak. Drag.

Squeak.

Drag.

I sighed, closed my eyes, and rested them against my soft white hospital pillow. Squeak. Drag. Squeak. I remembered the squeak of my new shoes against the basketball court only days — God, had it only been days? — earlier. The dripping sweat, the thumping heart, the pounding adrenaline, and the pull of my knee away from the rest of me.

I smiled, then grimaced, blushing at the bittersweet memory. I must have dozed off, the quiet beep of the machines in my room lulling me. I woke to find my parents at my bedside, looking frail and empty. I knew they were there to comfort me, but it looked like they were the ones who needed the comforting.

I tried to remember what had happened just before I fell asleep. Dr. Rosso talking, Mom and Dad hovering, conferring in the hall, crying in each other's arms, and that word, what was it again?

Oncologist. That was it. But what did it mean? I wanted to know how a simple word, spoken by our family doctor, could have such a strange effect on my parents. I asked them to tell me. They did. They had to. They were my parents; they alone couldn't lie to me.

I watched in quiet anticipation as they stumbled over the words, leaning on each other for support, trying to be strong, and all I heard was the shuffling of their nervous feet on the linoleum floor of my hospital. Shuffle. Squeak. Shuffle.

It's funny how easily — and quickly — your life can be separated into before and after. I'd had my before. The lunch bell five days earlier. Standing in line. Joking with my friends. Hassling the lunch ladies with the rest of the guys. Apologizing with my

eyes when they weren't looking. Fishing out my $1.50 for lunch. Beefaroni and a hot buttered roll and a tiny milk carton and a tan plastic tray before hustling to the gym to get in a quick pickup game before lunch ended. Squeak. Pivot. Squeak. Turn. Squeak.

Shoot.

Squeak.

That sound — the varnish, the squeak of new shoes — was my before.

That sound — my parents crying, the word "oncologist" — was my after.

And nothing would ever be the same again.

Copyright © 2007 by Sean Swarner