Everyday I Fight

I recently read the book, Everyday I Fight by Stuart Scott.  If cancer has touched your life,  you need to read this book.  For those of you not familiar with Stuart, he hosted shows on ESPN for more than 20 years until he died in January 2015 from cancer of the appendix.  I have always liked sports and I grew up watching him.

The foreword of this book is written by Robin Roberts who was a close friend of Stuart’s and she mentions that when they were fighting cancer, they both “focused on the fight, not the fright.”  I think that is great advice and I think that this book is proof of what an inspiring fighter Stuart Scott was.

In this book he is brutally honest about what cancer looked like for him and he stressed how much of the battle was mental, because it is true cancer messes with your head.  “A study released by the Duke Cancer Center in 2011 found that 4 out of 10 cancer patients are plagued by symptoms of PTSD for as long as a decade after the end of their treatment.”  A decade!

You know that old saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”?  Well Stuart points out in this book that this is not true of cancer.  He states, “Cancer can kill you, but it can also make you the man you always wanted to be.”  I wholeheartedly agree that I am a better person because of it.  I’m not giving credit to the cancer but to the human spirit’s response to it.

Stuart goes on to stress that “you don’t lose to cancer because you die, you beat cancer by how you live and why you live.”  I love this statement because I have found that there are people out there that act as if we can change the outcome somehow if we just pray enough, fight enough, or believe enough.  The truth is that we don’t have control, God does, so let’s make our life count no matter how long of life that may be.

I highly recommend that you read this book, it just may change your entire outlook on life.  I know I am glad I did.  In the words of Jimmy Valvano, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”