The only disability in life is a bad attitude ~Scott Hamilton

"I didn't have any symptoms, I just went in for my normal check up and they found the beginnings of the brain tumor coming back. 

"I have a unique hobby of collecting life threatening illness," You know, I survived cancer in 97, seven years later 2004 

I was diagnosed with a pituitary brain cancer. First thing, "okay that's not fair." Alright, I have had cancer, I get a pass for a while.

But then, you know when I told my wife, the first thing she did without even a beat of emotion or anything else she just grabbed both of my hands and she started to pray. And it was powerful, I mean it changed everything for me.

Because I realized where you go when you are truly up against it.

Ironically, I was born with that brain tumor, but for those years that I skated I was not symptomatic at all and then it came back six years later in 2010 and that time we did surgery and now it is six years later and it decided that it wanted an encore.

I learned as a parent that if your kid falls down and you go, are you okay and they go, I'm not, I don't know, I'm freaking out.  You kind of set the stage. Right, so when this one came back my 12 year old son he came to me and he said, "Is your brain tumor back?" and I go yeah it is! And you know, here we go again. So I set the tone.

Because anytime, you know, cancer's a tough thing and it's just really devastated a lot of families. I lost my mother to cancer and it changed my life forever. But we choose, I choose to truly in everything that we do celebrate life, "The first thing I teach skaters at my skating academy is how to get up  because we're going to fall," I wrote a chapter in my last book, The Great Eight and it's called "Fall down, get back up, and smile like Kristi Yamaguchi" And every night I would watch Kristi and she took a hard fall on a really difficult jump

at the beginning of one of her programs and she got up and like that, went right back to her program like nothing had happened. And so I'm sitting there going, Did she just fall or not? I think she did, okay I'm confused because, she's joyful and I realized in that moment there's a life lesson there. Yeah, I'm going to fall down, I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to do all kinds of things that I'm going to wish didn't happen. But it's what's next it's how you get up … The more times you get up, the stronger you are to face the next thing, which will happen because that's life." 

Scott Hamilton October 21, 2016