Beating leukemia twice fuels pilot's goal to give back

When Eric Crowley sits at a Starbucks and admits that he isn't so sure he'll be able to finish a half-marathon for charity, I have to laugh. Even if he weren't trim and muscular enough to still be playing hockey at age 32, Crowley is not the sort of guy you should ever, ever bet against.

He was just a 12-year-old kid in Roselle the first time people thought he might die.

"I was at football practice, and I hurt my shoulder tackling the dummy, and for a long time, I couldn't raise my shoulder," Crowley remembers.

When the athletic boy seemed sluggish and lost weight, his mother knew something was wrong.

"I remember my mom getting the phone call and she was crying," Crowley says of the day a doctor broke the news that he had leukemia. "I started chemo the next day."

The story of how his parents, Michael and Linda, and his little brother Adam made every sacrifice they could to save his life during a grueling three years of chemotherapy and radiation made for inspiring stories in the Daily Herald during the 1990s. Schools, businesses, churches, strangers and the entire community supported the boy.

Crowley went into remission and lived his young life to its fullest, playing hockey and football and "being a normal kid," he remembers.

At age 17, during a trip to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to donate his bone marrow in case the leukemia ever returned, the Crowleys got the devastating news that the deadly disease was back.

"On the drive back, sitting in the back seat, I was holding back tears, thinking I was going to die," Crowley says. "That's the first time I thought I was going to die."

Always a fighter with a positive attitude, Crowley says he put up a brave front most of the time because "I never wanted to let my parents know."

They knew. Dozens of relatives failed to be the good match Crowley needed for a bone-marrow transplant. The first search of donor databanks in the United States and Europe came up empty.

"That was the second time I thought, 'OK. I'm done,'" Crowley remembers.

Then Thomas Lowther, a police chief in the small Oregon town of Forest Grove, registered as a donor. Two months later, Lowther saved Crowley's life.

Crowley remembers the pain, vomiting, hair loss, scars from radiation, fatigue, a 106-degree fever, the miniature golf date when he wore a backpack that pumped toxic chemicals into his body, the way his entire family moved to New York for a year-and-a-half, the protective gloves he wore in his "bubble" while he played video games with his brother on the other side of the door, the constant nosebleeds, the itchy skin, the inability to taste anything, the nightmare of having his entire family spend much of his childhood fighting a disease that wanted to kill him.

"Yeah," Crowley says, "but at the same time, I feel I've had one of the best childhoods and lives that anyone could have."

He graduated on time with his high school class, became an EMT and a firefighter, and fulfilled his boyhood dream of being a pilot.

"I want to help people, to give something back," says Crowley, who joined The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, where he hopes to raise $1,700 and awareness by running in a marathon May 2 in his new hometown of Cincinnati.

Having been laid off from his pilot job on Dec. 7, ("If any people are looking for a pilot, I'm available"), Crowley is working a few odd jobs while he trains and looks for another flying job. He's certainly been through tougher times.

Leukemia left him with a "determination" and a "look on life" that he appreciates.

"In a sick way, I guess I'm glad," Crowley says. "I learned a lot from it."

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Visit www.bethematch.org to find out more about marrow or umbilical cord blood donation. To donate to Crowley's run, visit his Facebook page or go to http://pages.teamintraining.org/soh/flypig10/ecrowleetr