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That was the end of the message. I saved his e-mail to a disk, printed it out, and looked at the
words. The Tour? Johan didn't just think I could be a stage racer again, he thought I could be a
Tour rider. He thought I could win the whole thing. It was worth considering.
Over the next few days, I read and reread the e-mail. After a year of confusion and self-doubt, I
now knew exactly what I should do. I wanted to win the Tour de France.
WHAT YOU LEARN IN SURVIVORSHIP is THAT AFTER ALL the shouting is done, after
the desperation and crisis is over, after you have accepted the fact of your illness and celebrated
the return of your health, the old routines and habits, like shaving in the morning with a
purpose, a job to go to, and a wife to love and a child to raise, these are the threads that tie your
days together and that give them the pattern deserving of the term "a life."
One of the things I loved about Boone was the view it offered. When I cycled around an
unexpected bend in the road, suddenly the landscape opened up, the line of trees parted, and I
could see thirty mountain ranges stretching to the horizon. I was beginning to see my life in the
same way.
I wanted to have a child. When I was sick, fatherhood was something obscured around the next
bend, perhaps impossible, a lost chance. Now my view was as clear and crystallized as those
mountain ranges in the distance, and I didn't want to postpone fatherhood any longer.
Fortunately, Kik was as ready as I was. We understood each other perfectly despite the
upheavals of the last year, and we'd held on to a sweet harmony, the kind that makes you want
to join with another and create a new human being.
Ironically, the process would be almost as medically intricate as a cancer treatment: it would
require as much research and planning, and a raft of syringes, drugs, and two surgeries. I was
sterile. In order to get pregnant, Kik would need in-vitro fertilization (IVF), using the sperm I
had banked in San Antonio on that awful day.
What follows in these pages is an attempt to render the experience truthfully and openly. A lot
of couples are private about their IVF treatment and don't want to talk about it at all, which is
their right. We aren't. We understand we may be criticized for being so free with the
details, but we have decided to share them because so many couples deal with infertility and are
faced with the fear that they may not be able to have a family. We want them to hear the
specifics of IVF so they understand what's ahead of them. For us, it was forbidding but worth
i t .
We planned to start our family right after the New Year, and I began to research in-vitro as
thoroughly as cancer, scouring the Internet and consulting with physicians. We scheduled a trip
to New York City to visit the IVF experts at Cornell University. But as the date drew closer on
the calendar, we started having second thoughts. The experience was going to be clinical and
impersonal enough, and we were so tired of travel that the idea of being in a strange hotel room
for weeks in New York sounded as unappealing as a chemo cycle. We changed course and
decided to seek an IVF specialist at home in Austin, Dr. Thomas Vaughn.
On December 28, we had our first consultation with Dr. Vaughn. Both of us were nervous as
we sat on the couch in his office, and out of habit I wore what Kik called my "medical
demeanor," which I put on in any clinical situation, a tight-lipped, hard look. Kik smiled a lot to
offset my grimness, so Dr. Vaughn would think we were fit to be parents.
As we discussed the IVF procedure, I noticed Kik blushed slightly. She wasn't used to the
clinical language, but after testicular cancer, discussing sexual matters publicly with strangers
was no big deal to me. We left the office with a rough plan in place and a sense of surprise that
it could happen so fast if things worked, Kik could be pregnant by February. The timing was
important, because we'd have to plan the arrival of the new baby along with my cycling
schedule if I wanted to win the Tour de France.
Two days later, Kik went to an X-ray lab for her first appointment. Nurses strapped her to a
sliding X-ray table and stuck a torture device inside her that sprayed dye. The X ray was to
make sure she didn't have any blocked tubes or other problems. Well, the nurses messed up
twice before they finally got it right, and it hurt Kik to the point that she sobbed. But, typical
Kik, she was impatient with herself for crying. "I'm so pathetic," she said.
The next night was New Year's Eve, the last night of libations for her. As of the New Year she
forswore alcohol and caffeine. The following morning my Java Queen nursed a hangover and
caffeine withdrawal, and from then on she didn't touch a drop. We wanted our baby to be
pristine.
A week later, we had an appointment at the hospital for what we thought was a simple meeting
with an IVF nurse. Wrong. We walked into the room and it was, no joke, staged like an
intervention. Two long tables faced each other, with tense couples holding hands in utter
silence. A too-chipper nurse said she had to take our photo for her files, so we gritted our teeth
and smiled, and we sat down for two hours of Sex Ed, complete with old films of sperm
swimming up the tubes. We'd all seen it in high school, and we didn't want to see it again. The
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