Are You Ready for Some Football?
For the entire football season in 2017, I used both NFL and College ball as a major distraction while I was going through the second half of a year of Chemotherapy for brain cancer. A football and sports fan already, it was not a stretch for me to dive in head first. I had already gone mad in March (Rock Chalk Jayhawk), and watched the Cleveland Indians dominate the MLB until those damn Yankees showed up so my favorite sport, football, was an obvious next obsession. The beginning of the 2018 season has me realizing just how much has changed.
Last year, at this time, I was only 6 months out of surgery and knee deep in Physical and Occupational Therapy. I wore a brace on my leg and used a hiking stick to keep my balance. The idea of a curb horrified me. Stairs might as well have been Mount Everest. And I voluntarily poisoned myself once a month. Oh, the good old days. NOT!
Football and sports gave me a way to focus on something other than my health. It was important to concentrate on getting better, of course, but it was far too easy to obsess and end up in a dark place. It can still be, but, since those days I have faced and conquered many physical and mental challenges brought on by the evil “C.”
I got the invitation of a lifetime in November of last year that also posed one of the biggest challenges thus far in my recovery. My sister invited me to Dallas for the Kansas City Chiefs and Cowboys game. Heart palpitations! Is my love for the Chiefs bigger than my fear of traveling, stairs, crowds and stepping outside my safe zone? Yes, yes it is.
I flew to Dallas, went to the amazing AT&T Stadium, dealt with stairs, a massive bunch of Cowboys fans and walked further than I had since learning to walk again. Oh, and I suffered through a Chiefs loss. I wasn’t all too happy about that, but I was thrilled to have proven so very much to myself. Since that shot of confidence, I know that I “can” far more often than I “can’t.”
