New dawn a blessing for Sutcliffe

For those who have stared down the ultimate foe, there is an encompassing - or at least accompanying - sense of it all being a temporary condition anyway.

Borrowed time, as it were.

An uncollected debt only until it's not.

Rick Sutcliffe didn't think much about paying up, not when he was always paying forward, not when you lived as he did, the world's guest and the universal life of the party.

Until last March, his biggest concern was how to cut his schedule so he could play more and work less, something he had absolutely earned, but something difficult to accomplish with his services in high demand.

Until he went for that checkup, the biggest break of his life was being traded from Cleveland to Chicago.

But all the plans and dreams, and the lists of biggest this and best that, aren't worth the gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe when you're told you have colorectal cancer.

"I was a day away from going to spring training,'' Sutcliffe says now. "I didn't even need a physical, is what I thought. I felt great. I had no symptoms of anything. I didn't need to see a doctor.

"I almost left without getting it done. But I had a routine colonoscopy. If I didn't, man, I don't know. It's not good.

"I had cancer and didn't even have the sniffles. Never would have known. If they didn't catch it early - if they didn't catch it early -

"I got lucky, boy. I got really, really lucky.''

Rick Sutcliffe opened Christmas presents this morning from friends and family, but to say his greatest gift is that of health - a clean bill of health - is an understatement of such grand proportions as to sell short the magnitude of the journey just concluded.

"It wasn't that many months ago that I was wondering if I was supposed to count how many days I got left,'' Sutcliffe said quietly. "Now, I had my last surgery in early November and I feel great.

"I'm all put back together now. All my plumbing is working. The doctor said, 'See you in a year.' No concerns or anything. See you later.''

And when you get that news, you don't ask why. You know the difference between you and the guy in the next bed is a coin flip, so you don't stop for questions and you don't question the answers.

You run for the door before they change their minds.

"I think a lot about my daughter, Shelby, who I got to see married and graduate from Harvard Medical School this year,'' Sutcliffe said. "I think a lot about the kids I saw in the hospital, who haven't even had a chance to live yet. That's just wrong. I think about those kids all the time.

"I just can't believe what I've been given. I just shake my head a lot. I'm very grateful.''

Sutcliffe had much the same reaction after he threw out the first pitch before a Cubs playoff game in October, an event he pointed toward that kept him going during his worst days of radiation and chemotherapy.

"I was shaking before the game, I was so nervous,'' Sutcliffe said. "Kerry Wood comes up to me in the dugout and says, 'Don't make me look bad.' I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I wouldn't miss this.' He wanted to catch it.

"I did it with my ostomy bag hanging out of my gut. Nobody knows that. The crowd was nuts. People were screaming.

"You know, there's all kinds of healing. I got up to the booth about the bottom of the first, and right away there's a knock on the window next to me, and there's Ron Santo, who should be in the Hall of Fame, who's overcome more than anyone ever has. He gives me a thumbs-up.

"Next to me is Jon Miller, who will be in the Hall of Fame, and he hugs me, and then there's a knock on the window on the other side and there's Vin Scully, a Hall of Famer, and he bows to me.

"After all I'd been through, I said, 'How good is it to be me right now?' That was some day.''

As is today. It's the first Christmas for Rick Sutcliffe as a cancer survivor, completing a year of firsts that he quite obviously never expected.

"I just had the best Thanksgiving of my life,'' Sutcliffe said from his home near Kansas City. "And this is the best Christmas ever.

"You start thinking about what you're thankful for, and my list is a lot longer than it's ever been before.

"We should all be thankful to be alive, and that our loved ones are with us, but I guess a lot of us don't do that until we're forced to face something like this, and then we realize how easily it can all go away.

"I was lucky. I caught it early. Catch it early and give yourself a chance. Go get a colonoscopy. If I had gotten one at 50 instead of 51, I might not have had any problem at all.

"Of course, had I waited until 52 -''

Rick Sutcliffe took a deep breath, sighed, and wished an old friend the best for this season and the upcoming year, with a reminder that the future is promised to no one.

With that, he hung up the phone, returning to a crackling fire and the warm blanket that is his family.

Sutcliffe might have added that while the past is part epilogue and the future mostly unknown, the present, on this day and all others, is undoubtedly borrowed.

And unquestionably the greatest gift of all.

brozner@dailyherald.com