fun. The whole concept began with: go to a ballgame with someone you like, have a few beers and enjoy the game.
I also knew it would give us a chance to meet new people, educate folks about leukemia and the bone marrow registry and transplants and attempt to swab as many folks as divinely possible.
Plus, we’d have new stories to tell.
I viewed it as a summer of my Jack Kerouac Great American Journey. I could drink beer, watch baseball, connect with friends and relatives all over the continent, promote an amazing cause and actually meet new human beings who love baseball, tell them our story and give them a chance to save someone else’s life.
And I didn’t even have to bring a bible or any religious materials!
The planning started on Sept. 11, 2014 when Major League Baseball released the 2015 schedule but the concept came at my wife’s bedside at Johns Hopkins right after we received the worst news of our lives.
* * *
AT 5:10 P.M ON MARCH 20, 2014, A TEAM of doctors in white suits walked into my wife’s hospital room at Johns Hopkins, shut the door and told us that she had leukemia.
This changed our lives and my career.
After the initial shock of the first night – and once the social media firestorm that our announcement had created cooled a bit during the weekend – I found all of my old Tony Robbins “life notes” from the 1990s when I was designing the kind of life I wanted to lead and what I stood for in my twenties.
A “firewalk” I attended in Washington, D.C. in July 1994 shaped many aspects of my life and my founding principles, goals and dreams. It’s not the first time I’d returned to these notes and assessed where my life is and where it was going. It was very obvious that a massive part of surviving these oft-times fatal diseases and the battle with cancer is a desire to live.
We all remember Jim Valvano’s speech imploring victims:
“Don’t give up . . . Don’t ever give up!”
In 2015, they call it a “bucket list” but in 1994 it was simply called “life goals” in my notes. As a married couple heading into our second decade together with a lot of life ahead of us, we spent a lot of time talking about the things she wanted to do on the other side of this gruesome battle in the early days of her diagnosis.
Jenn and I settled into the fifth floor at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center. We decorated her hospital room – we called it “the hotel” – and spent the next 42 days together, 18 hours a day, fighting for her life. The blood, the vomit, the drugs, the pain, the fatigue, the fear, the drain, the rash, the torture of chemotherapy, the days when she couldn’t move and the look in her eyes some days was one of despair and hopelessness and fatigue and constant pain and anguish.
But she fought. And fought. And took Valvano’s words to heart.
The doctors told us on Day 8 that she had among the most rare forms of leukemia in the cancer world and that we’d need a series of miracles for her to
