Run . . . I Had Cancer!

“My kid Eli’s gonna run the New York Marathon,” I tell my buddy.

“Wow, really?. . . Eli? Has he ever run a marathon before?”  

“Nope.”

“What’s the farthest he’s run?”

“To first base.”

I know my kid. Twenty-four years old, out of college, works in the music industry in New York. Like his dad, he’s not one into planning out much. One day at a time, go with the flow, and see which way the winds of life and the tides of time will take you. If it looks interesting . . . do it. If it doesn’t look interesting . . . do that too, just to say you did. 

I’m pretty sure it was an impulse decision, kinda like when you go to Costco and see a combo-pack screwdriver / socket wrench set or a twenty-count box of avocados and toss it in your cart when all you really went there to get is a case of water and eight rolls of toilet paper.

Instead of avocados, he signed up to run the New York Marathon. 

He tells me he was sitting around with his older brother, Max, complaining that he was getting fat, needed to get back into shape and lose some weight.  While most people might just try to diet or maybe join a gym, Eli needed something more motivating—like running 26.2 miles with 50,000 other people. 

He went online and registered, probably just glossing over the fact that he needed to raise $3,500 for a charity in order to guarantee him a slot. When he saw the list of charities though, one immediately stood out.

Fred’s Team

In 2014 Eli’s  brother and my oldest son, Max, was diagnosed with leukemia while in college in New York. He spent nearly seven months in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, horribly ill, most of it in isolation. I slept in a chair next to his bed for most of those seven months. Even now the memories are like molten lead stuck in my throat—thick, hot, and unyielding. I’ve kind of resigned myself to that being my new reality. I’m burnt with those memories I guess, but at the same time I got to bear witness to the best of the human condition—friends donating blood, incredible doctors, nurses, hospital volunteers, countless offers of help and assistance from food to housing to prayer . . .

But most of all I got to see the strength of his brothers . . . I got to bear witness to my three boys becoming my three men in a matter of days.Those memories I wouldn’t trade for anything.

However, during the first few months of chemo we became aware of Fred’s Team. Orange signs seemed to be popping up everywhere around the hospital situated just off 67th and 1st in the heart of New York City, and the marathon, I was told, would be running right past our windows.

“Oh they are a group of runners who raise money for cancer research,” one nurse told me. “They’ve been around since I’ve been here.” I may have tossed a few bucks into a bucket for them, I can’t recall. I hope I did.

Fred’s Team, as I have been told by one of their dedicated marathoners and my friend Erica Rubenstein (2019 NYC marathon time of 3:33), was founded by a true visionary, hero, and passionate runner Fred Lebow who, while being treated for brain cancer in 1991, jogged the halls of Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He asked his running buddies that year to raise money during the New York Marathon and donate the proceeds for cancer research to Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Aubrey Fund. Since 1995 Fred’s Team has raised more than 88 million dollars that helps support more than 100 laboratory investigators, 9 research programs, and 400 research fellows. I have little doubt that my son’s survival from cancer is in part a mystical manifestation of waffled-patterned Nikes and New Balances pounding miles of pavement through limestone-framed office-monuments of the greatest city on earth.

So in the fall of 2014 my son Max got the OK to leave the hospital for a bit, make a sign and offer some words of encouragement for the team that was running to raise money for such an important cause. I might have helped a bit with the wording.

In 2019 his brother Eli, after a brutal 7 months of training (which really amounted to a glass of fine bourbon a night and an occasional light jog to catch the subway), strapped on a pair of old jogging shoes and, at a blistering time of 8 hours and 26 minutes and 37 seconds, beat out 66 other runners to finish the New York Marathon. 

And he raised more than 3,500 dollars in the process to fight cancer.

Which in my book makes him a champion.

Dr. Louis M. Profeta is an emergency physician practicing in Indianapolis and a member of the Indianapolis Forensic Services Board. He is a national award-winning writer, public speaker and one of LinkedIn's Top Voices and the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God. Feedback at [email protected] is welcomed. For other publications and for speaking dates, go to louisprofeta.com. For college speaking inquiries, contact [email protected].