I can grow, I can learn, I can teach. Those are the three things in life that will always get you by! And here’s the thing about life, when you get stuck, any one of those three things, it will kick you ‘til you’re unstuck, whether you want to or not.
“I tell my friends all the time that what I do is look through the front of the windshield; I don’t look in the rearview mirror. You know what this is: you have to see the obstacles in front of you, and you go through them; they’re speed bumps. Some are bigger potholes; some are bigger bumps. You know, you gotta slow down a little bit more, from that standpoint, but there’s no use looking in the back. What’s behind you is behind you, and then look forward.”
“I got ready to go to school, I went to say goodbye to Mom, but she wouldn’t wake up to say goodbye to me. I left for school, and couldn’t think, couldn’t focus. I knew something wasn’t right. Whatever power you’d like to say was involved, my mom knew that I needed to know, and I needed to get to say goodbye. The doctors said that she should never have woken up that day, she should’ve been gone first thing in the morning, that when she went into the coma, she should’ve been gone at that point, but when I got home from school at 10 after 3, she opened her eyes and said goodbye to me. She was gone at quarter after 3. She waited for me, to say goodbye.”
“I am fortunate, it is a funny thing to say that you are fortunate when you have cancer but I mean I am fortunate I have seen people who are much worse off than I am, much sicker than I am. And I have seen people who are much younger than me much sicker than me, which I mean is just really a terrible thing to see.”
“In the Marine Corps, we’re taught this. When the enemy attacks, you don’t let the enemy attack. You assault the enemy. You press into them. So we got as much information as we could. He started eating right, started getting himself squared away and everything like that. He went through a nasty bout of chemo, lost a lot of weight. My brother…God bless him. My brother was a very vain man. He had long hair and he lost all of it. Well, he went into remission for a little while, got through the chemo. He just kept fighting.”
“You’re changed. The thing is, when you’re told you have cancer, you don’t have any choice in the matter. You have to accept it. You can’t say, “Nah, I don’t think I want cancer.” You’re told you have it and you just have to accept it and you have to start moving. Things that were important to me before diagnosis, I don’t even really care about them. In the overall scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal. It helps you to re-prioritize your life.”
“Everybody hears the word “cancer” and they are immediately scared. They immediately think they are going to die. I didn’t have those feelings, but everyone around me had those feelings and those thoughts. I felt like I had to be the strong one and the one that had to hold everyone together during that time. We didn’t have any history of cancer in the family; I was the first member in my entire extended family to have any form of cancer. It brought my family together and raised awareness, especially through my family for testicular cancer.”
The Illini 4000 • PO Box 2431 Champaign, IL 61825 • The Illini 4000 is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
