I was moved to tears, I wish there were more athletes like him.
I'm sure there are many more, we probably never would've gotten to "know" Devon Still if his little girl hadn't gotten gravely ill. She's an adorable, bright 5-year-old girl, sadly, she's probably not gonna make it to double figures, and I get the impression Devon knows it. Sucks. I watched my nephew when he was 8 go through hell with brain cancer --- the same disease that killed his mother (my sister) in her 20s. He was given little chance of getting through that one, but he did and got all the way to 20 before a second tumor in another part of the brain killed him.
I'll never forget going to visit him at the Strong children's hospital here in Rochester toward the end when docs were doing a bone marrow transplant as a last-ditch effort to try to save him. As I walked down the hall to my nephew's room, I tried to put on my blinders and not look at all the severely sick children in all the rooms along the way, but I'm not good at putting on blinders and glanced at the young children each going through their own nightmares. By now, 24 years later, I figure most of those poor kids are done suffering.
After I saw my nephew and walked down the stairs and out of the hospital, I thought if I ran into anyone who whined about the weather or their team losing a game or that Wegmans was out of their favorite cheese, I'd go medieval on them.
I think of my nephew and my sister and that day at the children's hospital whenever I need to slap myself in the face and snap out of some insignificant funk because of a "problem" lie a flat tire, downpours when I have outdoor plans, 'Cuse loses to Kentucky in '96, Jerry Garcia od's a month before I'm gonna take a train to NYC and take my younger (she was legal) girlfriend to her first Dead show at the Garden.
My nephew and my sister's experiences, along with several other traumatic events between 21 and 45, messed me up big-time, but they've also helped give me a pretty good handle on how valuable each day is, how lucky I am. When I was diagnosed with lymphoma five years ago last month and the doc called to tell me that he'd scheduled surgery for me and had me lined up with an oncologist at Strong to do further tests (bone marrow biopsy ... never again, over my dead body!) and determine the course of treatment, my heart sunk, my mouth was agape, and, before we said goodbye, I told the doc, "Oh, well, at least it ain't brain cancer." I meant it. I wasn't thrilled about surgery and tests and chemo and other poisons being dripped into my veins, but I felt lucky.
And, as sad as I was watching Devon Still talk about his 5-year-old daughter, Leah, and watching videos of her smiling and dancing with chemo tubes in her arm and see the love between that sweet, upbeat, beautiful little girl and her big NFL linesman daddy, I realized again how lucky I am, and most of us are, but too few get it. So, lookout winter weather whiners and the like, I'll be bringing my so-you-think-you-have-it-bad-go-visit-a-children's-cancer-ward later this year when the annual weather whining threads pop up on Syracusefan.com.
