In our lives we are often given second chances. My second chance came fifteen years ago. I had recently been promoted to Regional Market Manager for the Mountain Region which is a damn big title so my business cards had no title at all. The reality was in Montana (Mountain Region), if I was the only one in the office and a delivery truck arrived with product, I was The Warehouseman. And if I walked through the office and a trash can was full, I was The Janitor. Or if the phone rang, I was The Receptionist. You get the point. In reality, the geographic aspect of the operation was huge, and the staff size was about fifteen to twenty.

Randy, one of the sales reps, asked if I played softball and invited me to join his church league team. This particular event turned out to be my second chance at life. He informed me that it was a Baptist church team, “But you don’t have to actually GO to the church to play on the team.” Well, I grew up Baptist and I did decide to begin attending the church. As it turned out, I liked it and attended regularly during the period I lived in Billings.

I had been in Montana only a few months and was still more or less living out of boxes. Because I was mostly focusing on work, a little softball was welcome. I went to a practice at an elementary school and the field was… lets just say it was a goat ranch. Having played many years of  softball in Sacramento where they play under the lights 24/7/365 and most fields are in pristine shape, this was comical to me. It was comical until I went for a ball in center field and found a hole or mound (not really sure what it was) that caused me to lose my footing and trip resulting in a twisted knee. If I were to narrow the actual pinpoint of the second chance, it was that hole/mound knee twisting.

I was in pain when I got home and I took some nuprin (ibuprofen) and crashed for the night. In the morning, I woke with my knee still bugging me, and I decided to look for my knee brace. I searched box after box and found nothing. I then grabbed the yellow pages (now this WAS 1995 and Google didn’t exist). First I found medical clinics and then found one called Sports Medicine Clinic. I called and scheduled an appointment for later that morning to get fitted for a knee brace.

The doctor wanted to see an x-ray before the fitting to make sure there was no surgery needed. Most ortho docs are rather cut happy! He came back into the exam room to ask about something he saw on the x-ray, took a look at my leg below the knee, and told me he wanted another angle for the x-ray.

When he returned, he again examined the area of my leg below my knee, paying special attention to a bump on my tibia that I had previously been told was just a calcium deposit. He said, “It looks like you have a growth on your tibia,” while showing me the x-ray. It looked like a big grape to me. That grape was my second chance at life. It was a very rare form of a low grade – slow growing form of bone cancer. Typically, if you had this type of cancer, they would find it in your mid-forties because your leg would just break while walking one day. And you would then have only a very short time to live.

Dr. Robinson from Deaconess Medical Center and Billings Sports Medicine Clinic was responsible for finding it early enough to allow me to sit here and write this story about my second chance. I posted on facebook yesterday that 2010 represents my fifteenth year cancer free.  I thank  God everyday for my second chance.

The irony of it all, is that after all of the surgeries and the years of the healing process, I can no longer run or play softball – the cause and effect of it all.

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