CBN Sports
NFL Coach Trusts God's Game Plan for Healing
By Shawn Brown
The 700 Club
CBN.com -When Chuck Pagano was selected head coach for the Indianapolis Colts in 2012, he was living his dream. But after training camp started that July, he began noticing unexplainable bruises on his body that were slow to heal. But he put off going to the doctor.
“It was tough because first of all you don’t want to go get checked out, you know, you think you’re okay. We’re all invincible,” said coach Pagano.
By the third game of the season he couldn’t put it off any longer. In a visit to the doctor, coach learned that he had Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia commonly known as APL.
“You know, and then you’re sitting there, you know, in a patient room with your wife and you finally get the diagnosis. And so you got a brief moment, you know, to digest it. But then reality, you know, kicks in. And my first words to the doc were ‘hey, you know, what are my odds of beating this and what’s the game plan? What do I need to do to get out of here and beat it?’”
The doctor told coach Pagano that APL was curable but he needed to start chemotherapy immediately, which meant he had to put coaching on hold.
Shawn: “Mentally what are telling yourself?”
“Once he told me what the odds were, once he told me the game plan and what I had to do, that’s when I –I said, ‘you know what, I have a wife and 3 daughters and 3 granddaughters counting on me. I signed up for a lot longer. I signed up for life. That’s a job that I signed up for, for life, and who’s going to take care of these people. I’ve got a job to get back to.’ So I don’t think there was ever a moment after that that I didn’t know and I truly believe that I was going to beat cancer.”
But it was a tough battle to say the least.
“Getting diagnosed is one thing. Telling, you know, getting told that you can’t go home to even get some stuff for maybe a month’s stay in the hospital, my wife’s got to go get it, two minutes later you’re getting a pic line put in your arm. An hour later you’re in a hospital –hospital bed in a hospital room and they’re starting to pump some chemo into you already. You know, and then once that kicks in, the side effects. They give you one thing to help, you know, the pain and then pain causes something else and then whatever they give you to fix that causes another—another issue.”
As he began the rigorous chemo treatments, coach says he approached the struggle just as a he did the game of football.
“We face adversity all the time. You know, playing and coaching the game of football. And, you know, there was –there was tough days. There was dark moments, you know. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle. You know, going through the induction phase and going through the treatment with chemo.”
Coach says that it was during those times that he had to rely on his faith in the Lord for strength.
“Well, you know, faith and family have always been very, very important to me. But I know He has a plan, you know. And, you know, a lot of things get revealed to you when you go through circumstances. And that plan, you know, kept revealing itself day after day after day. And today’s a perfect day that we understand, you know, why, you know, cause we asked ourselves, okay, why did –why did He put us in Indy, why do we get, you know, the job of a lifetime, the dream job and then why would He put us down here?”
The team and fans rallied around Coach Pagano. While the Colts climbed toward the top of the division, Coach’s numbers began to improve as well. After a little over a month, he received the news he’d been waiting for.
“I can remember, you know the day before I got released, doc called and said um you know, the numbers look good. What I want you to do is get up tomorrow morning, you know, they want you out of bed, they want you walking, they want you exercising, you know, and you don’t want to do anything, And we were sitting in the break room after we had got up and walked. And, you know, Dr. Cripe came in. He said your, your numbers are good, you’re going home. It was a good day.”
On December 30, 2012 the last game of the season, Coach Chuck Pagano was back on the sideline. Today Coach Pagano’s cancer is in full remission. In his book Sidelined, Coach shares how he overcame the odds through unity, passion, and most of all faith.
Shawn: “Coach, what made you want to write this book now?”
“For that city and that community and the organization, the team, the coaches, for them to embrace me and my family the way that they embraced us and supported us, was just—it was a humbling experience to say the least. And now this is an opportunity. I have a platform and an opportunity where we can serve and give back and help all those that are –that have battled and are going to battle the bully they call cancer.”
As Coach Pagano heads into another NFL season he wants all to know that his #1 goal is simply to serve and that through God all things are possible.
“Battling cancer, battling whatever. You take it one day at a time, one treatment at a time, one dose of chemo at a time. You can trust. You know, and you got to believe. We talk all the time about, you know, faith is believing in what you can’t see and the reward for believing is that you will get to see it.”
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