Dewey Dickey Lives

The treatments knocked out the tumor, but shortly after Dickey finished the series, he became violently ill. He was vomiting, had a wicked headache, and couldn’t get out of bed. His sister rushed him to the hospital. Dickey begged for a spinal tap just to relieve the pressure. He was diagnosed with chemical meningitis, for which there was no treatment other than pain pills. After several days, the pressure subsided.

A month later, in September, diarrhea struck. He had to rush to the bathroom twelve, fifteen times a day. He couldn’t get out of bed—other than to go to the bathroom—let alone train. He wouldn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t want something else to be wrong. But the diarrhea persisted a week. Two weeks. Three. Four. Finally, he saw the doctor.

Dickey’s father had died of colon cancer in 2000. He had been a builder and developer and took time off work to drive Dewey to races, hand him water bottles, and function as his biggest fan. His death was the biggest loss of Dickey’s life.

The doctor, who knew Dickey’s family history, diagnosed him with a diseased colon and sent him home with a low dose of medicine. He didn’t get better. The diarrhea continued, with blood. Two weeks later, Dickey, who has a high tolerance for pain, couldn’t get off the couch. He used his cell phone to call his sister upstairs. She rushed him to the hospital again.

His colon was close to perforating. The doctor told him, “We’re taking it out tomorrow.” It was not negotiable; the danger was too great. They replaced it with an ileostomy bag, a slim pouch attached to a slit in his lower abdomen. “I went in there to get well,” Dickey says, “but I went home missing a big part of my body.”

He felt better immediately. The pain was gone, and it was a relief not to have to go to the toilet every five minutes. But, six weeks later, a twisted bowel required another rushed trip to the hospital and another emergency surgery. All told, he’d endured two trips to the emergency room, six major surgeries, four hospitalizations, six weeks of radiation, and multiple complications, including the meningitis—in less than twelve months. That would have led an ordinary person to take up golf. Dickey wanted to race again.

“No way,” thought Jeremy Sartain, Dickey’s friend and teammate. “The guy’s done racing.” Yet, when Sartain would call Dickey at the cancer house in Rochester where he stayed during his radiation treatments, Dickey didn’t talk about his situation; he wanted to know how Jeremy was doing. “He wasn’t complaining,” Sartain says. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s got a real positive attitude.’ ”

Sometimes, Dickey had to excuse himself from the phone. He would go to the bathroom, vomit, and resume the conversation. “Right then, I knew I was wrong about him,” Sartain says. “He was tough.”

So it was that Dickey showed up at Grand Performance for that first training ride back with his team in April 2005. He’d been riding on his own since February, but this was the test, his first ride with competitive cyclists. When the group started to hammer, he couldn’t drive the pace as he had in the past. He’d thought he was stronger. He’d been training hard and properly, but his body hadn’t responded as it used to. Frustration surged.