Fortunately, this is 2007 and not all cancers come with a death sentence.
My mother graduated from Cambridge City Nursing Hospital in the 1930s and she never threw away her college textbooks. In 1993, I looked up the word "leukemia" in one of her medical dictionaries and the definition began with "a fatal disease . . . " There was no allowance for hope. It was a fact of those times, and that is why people of a certain age recoil in fear and dissolve into tears at any mention of a cancer diagnosis. But it's different in 2007. Today, doctors are able to cure up to 85 percent of children diagnosed with leukemia.
And they are able to say it's OK for Jon Lester to pitch professionally; tonight he gets the ball in Cleveland against the Indians.
Sox fans politely and respectfully steered clear of Lester talk last winter and most of this spring. Perhaps owing to a half century of the ball club's Jimmy Fund involvement, or perhaps because almost every family has been visited by some form of cancer, Lester talk was off limits when looking ahead to the 2007 season. This was a time to be proud of one's membership in Red Sox Nation. When assembling their ideal pitching rotations for the upcoming season, fans put the health of a young man first, and kept Lester out of the discussion. It was a period of universal class and dignity for all who call themselves Red Sox fans.
It became harder to keep Lester out of the mental mix in February when we saw him in Florida with a full head of hair, telling us he was back to his old pitching weight. It was clear the young lefty was tired of the kid glove treatment. He didn't want to be "Cancer Boy." He wanted to be like everybody else. He wanted a chance to pitch his way back to the big leagues.
But the Red Sox kept him away from the big Grapefruit League crowds and major league hitters. Lester pitched on small fields with empty stands against minor leaguers.
"Given what we know, there's not a long track record of professional pitchers coming back from cancer," Sox general manager Theo Epstein said yesterday. "We did the best we could with this process with a high degree of caution."
