Character Driven

by Derek Fisher

  Obviously, there is never a good time to have anyone in your life become sick, but the circumstances of Tatum’s diagnosis were marked by all kinds of potential pitfalls. That spring we had only recently moved from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City. I had been traded during the off-season, but with the kids still infants and lots of loose ends to tie up, it hadn’t made sense to move right away that summer. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to the problems of moving and having to find new doctors, plus deal with health insurance companies (we were fortunate to have good coverage) and all the issues of who’s in network and who’s not. Candace had been concerned that something wasn’t quite right with Tatum’s eye, but had been assured by our pediatrician that nothing was wrong. Only when we finally settled in Salt Lake City and Candace pursued second and third opinions did Dr. Katie McElligott confirm my wife’s suspicions. I was at practice when the voicemail message came in telling me that we needed to get to a pediatric ophthalmologist that afternoon. I joined them there, and I was glad that we had been persistent and followed Candace’s gut instinct that something was wrong. If we had waited and if we’d let the red tape of insurance companies deter us, I don’t know what the outcome would have been.

  Call it a mother’s intuition, call it her keen sense of observation, call it the Lord moving in mysterious ways, but whatever you call it, we were grateful that we had acted on Candace’s suspicions. Neither of us had ever heard the word retinoblastoma before, and I’d never even thought that people could have cancer of the eye. In most ways, Tatum was a typical ten-month-old child. Being fraternal twins, Drew and Tatum were going to be subject to a lot of comparisons, maybe more so than other siblings. When they were born, Tatum had darker skin than Drew, whose coloring was more cocoa. Drew had a lot more hair than Tatum, though now that isn’t the case, and he was always a lot less patient than her. When Drew was hungry, everyone in the house, and probably the surrounding neighborhood, knew that he needed food. He had to nurse or get a bottle immediately, and we could do nothing to persuade him to just hold on for a minute. Tatum, on the other hand, would wake from a nap and assess the situation, come fully awake and alert, then eat. Even from her earliest days, she seemed quite playful and mischievous, more capable of demonstrating a bit of an attitude.

  Candace had noticed that sometimes when she looked into Tatum’s eyes, something didn’t seem quite right. She couldn’t articulate exactly what was wrong, and each time I looked into my little girl’s eyes, I was so in love that I couldn’t imagine there being anything wrong with her. I felt the same about Drew. They seemed to me to be God’s perfect little creations—even if they did fuss and cry a bit. But sometimes when light shone in Tatum’s eye, Candace thought it didn’t seem to reflect back the same way it did from her other one, or in the same way it did from Drew’s. In the more than ten years that I’d known Candace, I’d learned to trust her instincts. If she thought something was wrong, then something had to be wrong.

  Candace noticed that in some photographs of Tatum, depending upon the angle, one of Tatum’s eyes reflected back a white light. That white light, visible in the pupils of children with retinoblastoma, is known as leukocoria or the cat’s-eye reflex. Just as a cat’s pupil appears white in certain lighting, so will that of a child who has retinoblastoma or other eye conditions including Coats’ disease. That white reflection in photographs does not always indicate those serious conditions, but it is definitely worth checking out with a doctor. We learned all of this only after Tatum’s diagnosis, and our doctors told us that it is a good idea to take a monthly flash photo of an infant and child to check for that telltale marker of a potential problem.

  After the examination, when the doctor told us that he’d detected some abnormalities and what he suspected was a tumor, I felt as if all the air in the room had been sucked out. I remember grasping Candace’s shaking hand, and my mind rushing. The sensation was like what happens when you are driving a standard-transmission car and you think you’re in gear but you’re in neutral. You hit the gas and you can hear and feel the vibration of the rapidly racing engine, but you don’t increase your actual speed. Thoughts were bouncing all around my head, but I wasn’t making any kind of positive steps toward coherence.

  Looking back on it, I now realize, how could it have been otherwise? I’m not a real worrier by nature, and despite the difficulty Candace and I had experienced in having lost a child previously, I didn’t fixate on the list of possible bad things that could happen to the twins before or after they were born. I had lost some people close to me, usually after a long and protracted illness, as with my grandmother. I’d lost a few older relatives, but they had lived what seemed to me then to be long lives. Nothing could prepare me for someone telling me that my daughter had cancer. It was a life-altering moment, like a kind of sign being driven into the ground indicating that was then, and next was now. Facing the prospect that she might lose not just her eye, but that we could lose her, was unimaginably difficult to process.

  In a way, hearing that news was also as if I’d instantly done some mental spring cleaning and thrown away anything that wasn’t needed and put everything else neatly into order. As clichéd as it sounds, I knew in that moment that very little besides my daughter’s health and my family’s safety mattered. All the little gripes and complaints I might have had about how the season was going, even though things were going well—any nagging pain from overuse or injury, any thoughts about upcoming games, whom I’d be matched up against—just neatly took their place in line behind—a long ways behind—one overriding concern: what were we going to do to help our daughter?

  The next day, Tatum was given an MRI exam that confirmed the diagnosis. We had a play-off game that night against Houston and I would suit up. At that point, no one except Jazz owner Larry Miller, General Manager Kevin O’Connor, and trainer Gary Briggs knew the specifics of the situation. They told me that I was under no pressure to play that night or any other during the play-offs. They agreed that Tatum’s condition and our privacy was what mattered the most.

  I had been making such a mad rush from practice to doctors’ appointments to the hospital for tests that the reality of what was going on with our child hadn’t really sunk in. We’d won the game, and only when I sat in front of my locker after the game did the truth hit me, and it hit me hard. I sat staring blankly ahead of me, a towel draped over my shoulders. A few minutes later, reporters were allowed in, and they were just doing their job, but the last thing I wanted to do was to talk about the game, the series, or anything to do with basketball. All I could think of was what my daughter potentially faced. I didn’t want anyone to see the anguish I was experiencing, so I went into Briggs’s office and broke down. In some ways the game had been good for me, a distraction, but it only delayed the inevitable. I was devastated. That private moment of despair was good for me, helped me get it out of my system and refocus on the task at hand—how to overcome the dire diagnosis and what seemed at the time the absolute certainty that Tatum’s eye would have to be surgically removed.

  The day after we met with Dr. Gobin and Dr. Abramson, on Wednesday, May 9, 2007, Tatum would undergo the procedure at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

  Dr. Abramson knew about the play-off game the Jazz had that night against the Golden State Warriors. As a former alternate on the 1960 men’s Olympic swimming team, he knew what an athlete’s life was like. He suggested that we could hold off doing the procedure, until after the game. A delay of just a few hours would have no effect on the prognosis for Tatum’s eye.

  “Absolutely not,” I told him. “Just do what’s best for my child. How many games I miss in the play-offs is totally irrelevant.” I meant every word of that, and even when Dr. Abramson suggested some possible adjustments to the schedule, I remained firm in my commitment to Candace and to Tatum. There hadn’t been any real need for discussion—Candace and I both knew that as difficult as the circumstances were, our decision on Tatum’s care was easy: spare no cost, leave no sto
ne unturned, and put basketball where it belonged on my list of priorities, well below my family and its needs.

  Doing the right thing came so easily because of the values that my mother, Annette, and my father, John, had instilled in me from the beginning. They made every sacrifice they could to enable me to be where I am today, and they demonstrated every day that you put your family members’ needs above your own. Dr. Abramson was simply trying to accommodate me and my needs, figure my career into the scheme, and I appreciated that, but I never questioned whether we should do the procedure as soon as humanly possible. This was an aggressive and risky treatment, and the two men who pioneered it gave off an air of quiet confidence that I’d always appreciated in teammates. Not that they needed any more motivation, but just to show how the Lord does truly move in mysterious ways, Dr. Gobin, who grew up in France, had lived for a time in Los Angeles while working at the University of California at Los Angeles medical center. He was a die-hard fan of the NBA team there and remembered me from my days with the Lakers. Score another bucket for the home team.

  I felt confident in the team we’d assembled. Dr. Gobin and Dr. Abramson were realistic but confident. I liked that about them both. They were as personable as could be without seeming smug or fake. They were clearly brilliant men, but their compassion and consideration for us as people, and not just as an opportunity to test a procedure that could make them famous or wealthy or both, really impressed me. They didn’t push us to try something; instead, they only agreed to do it when we brought up the possibility. Their confidence and calm helped to settle our nerves a bit, but nothing could still them completely. Dr. Gobin, who specialized in something called interventional neuroradiology, was a highly respected medical pioneer, primarily known for advanced treatment for stroke victims. In 2001, Dr. Gobin joined the Weill Cornell Medical College as professor of radiology and neurosurgery, and the New York Weill Cornell Hospital as the director of the Division of Interventional Neuroradiology.

  I didn’t know this at the time, but there was a third member of the medical team, Dr. Ira Dunkel, a pediatric oncologist who also worked with Dr. Abramson and Dr. Gobin to come up with this treatment. A tumor-killing drug would be injected through a tiny blood vessel in the eye. Within fifteen seconds, the drug is directly on-site in the tumor. It either destroys the tumor entirely and it disappears, or it becomes calcified.

  I’ve been anxious before games before, but nothing compared to the jitters I experienced that night. Prior to surgery, from our hotel room, we could see Central Park spread below us, and I envied the imagined emotional ease of the runners and cyclists I saw circling that great expanse of green. I’d heard that some people consider Central Park Manhattan’s lungs, providing a breath of fresh air squeezed out by the concrete ribs that surround it. I wished I could exhale, heave a great sigh of relief, but as daylight turned to twilight and then into full darkness, I found myself drawn to that window and knew that for me there was a very different reason that New York is the city that never sleeps.

  In some ways, Tatum’s being an infant was a blessing. We didn’t have to explain to her the risks, and she didn’t have to deal with the anxiety of knowing that she had cancer or that she faced a surgical procedure the next day. Unfortunately, we had no way to communicate to her that because of the procedure, she couldn’t eat. Normally, she was a happy and satisfied baby, but being forced to go without food had her especially fussy that night and the next morning. Candace and I had both flipped a switch in our minds the instant we got the diagnosis. We’d been in caregiver and protection mode all week and were especially alert that morning. It tore us up to hear Tatum’s wails, and to see her in distress was gut-wrenching. We made a few calls back to Utah to make sure that Drew, my daughter Chloe, and my stepson, Marshall, were doing okay. Once Tatum finally fell asleep, we made a few more phone calls to family members to let them know what was going on. My mother assured me that the prayer circle at Eighth Street Church back home in North Little Rock was complete and doing the necessary work. Until that night I’d never really thought of the significance of the name of my hometown. A rock can be a weapon or a refuge, and as Jesus told St. Peter, it was upon that rock He was going to build His church. Home and family have always been my rock, my touchstone, the place on which the foundation of my life was built. I could add that to the list of the many blessings I’ve received. Hearing my mother tell me that those prayers were going out, I knew that we had a whole bunch of folks on the sidelines and in the stands doing their best to help my family get through this difficult time.

  We knew that waiting while Tatum was in surgery was going to be the hardest part, but showing up at 7 a.m. for a 10 a.m. scheduled start was difficult. When one of the surgical-team members was called away by a separate emergency and Tatum’s procedure was delayed, our already protracted period of anxiety went into overtime. Though we weren’t guaranteed results, we had been encouraged by the success rate among the few patients who had previously undergone the treatment, and we had a lot of faith in the doctors. Knowing that any kind of invasive procedure was risky, and knowing that with an infant, and with the veins and arteries in such a delicate part of the anatomy—the eye—the operation required great precision, Candace and I were both on edge. We’d read up on the procedure, knew that this was the best chance we had, but still the thought of having toxins injected into our child’s system to attack a tumor was unsettling at best. I tried to stay focused on the positive and was grateful that my years in the league had taught me how to fight off distractions. Prayer made that task much easier as well.

  By the time we were instructed to put on masks and gowns so that we could escort Tatum into the operating room, a steady diet of adrenaline had begun to take its toll. Tatum too had exhausted herself, and I was grateful that she was asleep when Candace laid her down on the table. We both kissed her and told her that we loved her. I’ve faced some tough assignments in my life, but nothing compared to having to walk out of that room. I trusted the doctors and have faith in God, but leaving your child to face any kind of uncertainty or pain had me feeling as if a brick were lodged in my throat. When I turned back to catch one last glimpse of Tatum, I was struck again by how small and vulnerable she looked surrounded by all the adults in the room and the various monitoring devices. Walking out of that operating room was the toughest part of this ordeal yet.

  Most days when I have a game, I take a short nap to restore my energy before heading to the arena. We’d been told that the procedure would take a couple of hours, and I spent nearly every second of that time on pins and needles. I was grateful that our friend was there with us; he and I spent most of the time talking about what we imagined the progress was and counting down the minutes until someone came out to give us the promised midsession report. That report never came, but when one of the team members at last reported that the procedure had gone well, I was enormously relieved. When we saw Tatum being wheeled past us in a kind of incubator, my heart did skip a beat—seeing her in that device, alone and isolated, had our hearts aching for her as we walked alongside her to the recovery room.

  I was glad that we had a job to do while Tatum was in recovery. A tube had to be inserted through her femoral artery in her upper thigh. The doctors didn’t want the incision to tear open, so we were given the job of keeping Tatum still. As each minute passed postsurgery and she came out of her anesthesia-induced slumber, she grew more and more active and agitated. Another concern was that she keep down any fluids or food she was fed, so Candace and I worked together on that. It felt great to contribute to Tatum’s well-being and comfort. I don’t like to give up control, and the feelings of helplessness that I’d experienced during the operation had started to work on me. Just being able to hold Tatum in our arms made us feel as if we’d been given some powerful medicine to calm us and soothe the aches in our hearts.

  With the procedure completed and the early prognosis good, all we could really do was wait—both for Tatum to recover from the
anesthesia and for the three weeks to lapse before we returned to see if the chemotherapy had had the desired effect. With Tatum’s immediate safety and condition seemingly well in hand, I had a few moments to think about all that had happened. Through the week we struggled with Tatum’s health concerns, I’d been in close contact with the Utah Jazz organization, and they couldn’t have been more supportive. When Tatum was in recovery and sleeping again, I called Kevin O’Connor, the team’s general manager, to let him know Tatum’s status. I followed up that phone call with one to our coach, Jerry Sloan, simply to let him know how Tatum was doing. No one asked me if I’d be able to make that night’s game, no one pressured me in any way to commit to anything. They both simply were glad to hear that things had gone well for my daughter. That meant a lot to me. Though they were my bosses, work was something fairly far from their minds.

  During my phone call with Coach Sloan, I’d let the team know that as much as I wanted to remain on the active roster for that night’s game, I understood that it really wasn’t my decision to make. Basketball, and our series with the Warriors, diminished in importance compared to taking care of my family. That said, I still felt a sense of responsibility to my teammates, the organization, and the fans. We were, after all, in the play-offs and needed to maintain our home-court advantage with a win that night in Utah. The Jazz organization and fans had high hopes that we could make a run deep into the play-offs and win an NBA championship, which had eluded them.