Listen to What Chuck Daniel Has To Say When He Answered the Heroes Question "When Was The Lowest Point In Your Life and How Did You Change Your Life Path To One Of Victory Over the Obstacles You Were Facing at That Time?"
Chuck Daniel: I guess a low point would have been when I was quite young. I was 21 at the time, and I was attending the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada.
I was off for the summer, and I woke up one morning with this giant swelling on my neck. At first, I was kind of freaked out because I hadn?t had mumps yet, and that can have some pretty severe consequences if you get it as an adult, but it turns out I had something worse!
I had a form of cancer; the technical term is lymphoblastic lymphoma. It?s a form of cancer in which people of that age, the age of 21, it is normally fatal, and so I guess, you could say the low point for me is that at that age when you basically feel like you are invincible, you?re getting some news saying, “Hey, you?re not invincible and you have a pretty severe disease and you have to come to terms with it.”
For me, that was one of the lowest points of my life, at least in terms of the news and then, you have to come and gain some perspective that way.
I guess you asked, “How did it change my life?” I guess it changed it in some pretty fundamental ways. I don?t know if I?ve been pretty victorious against everything I?ve come up against. I have taken what I?ve learned from having cancer and been successful for most things.
You get a perspective that says, I decided that no matter what, I was going to do everything that I could to try and beat the disease, even though the treatment that they had at that time was not the greatest. The standard treatment was chemotherapy and radiation, and it wasn?t an exact science. They just did the best they could based on how they had treated people previously.
So, what I decided to do was that I decided I was going to try and beat it and I did beat it. I?m happy to say that I?ve been in remission for more than 20 years now.
The thing that happened from that is that I got the perspective of, I?m not invincible. I think part of my cancer was caused by the stress of a lot of things going on in my life just at that time, and so I learned to put things in perspective and not get so stressed out about certain things. Also, the fact that something even as severe as cancer can be beaten if you believe that you can beat it and that attitude has really affected everything that I have done from that point on.