Cancer survivor serves as mentor for those with disease

• Greg Cantwell, a brain cancer survivor, promotes a positive attitude to other survivors
• Diagnosed in 2004 after a seizure, Cantwell was given a 5% chance of surviving two years
• Survivors write on his site about being inspired by his turning tragedy into triumph

DES MOINES, Iowa — After Greg Cantwell met Lisa online, and they got together, she told him she had cystic fibrosis and would die from it. Greg told Lisa he had a brain tumor and would die from it.

"Yeah, right," Lisa laughed.

Greg joked around a lot. So she went home and "Googled him."

"Oh s---," she said.

Greg and Lisa got married in 2009. They live in Coralville, Iowa, survive day to day, month to month, and this is how they spend their days:

Lisa Cantwell, 34, goes to work every day helping others get matched with bone marrow at the University of Iowa Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Greg Cantwell, 38, travels all over visiting people with brain cancer. He doesn't get paid. People find him through his website, www.gregsmission.org. They are people who are told they will probably die. The news is grim with every online post they click. Then they see this one shining light — a website with the heading "Winning the fight of your life!" — and they call.

Greg tells them to stay positive, to fight, to take a look at him.

He was given a 5% chance of surviving more than two years with the deadliest type of brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme. It's been nine.

You are not a statistic, he tells them. You are a patient, not a diagnosis.

"He feels really lucky he survived and a lot of people didn't," Lisa said. "He is doing this out of thanks."

Greg needed chemotherapy for his cancer. Lisa needed a liver transplant because of her cystic fibrosis.

It changed them physically. Greg got tattoos — "cancer" inked on one forearm, "survivor" on the other. ("I could have killed him," Lisa said. "I don't like tattoos.")

It changed them mentally.

"You know life is short," Lisa said. "Regardless of brain tumors, cystic fibrosis, bad liver, anyone can be hit by a bus tomorrow. We may be at higher risk, but we're just thankful for what we have every day and try to live life to its fullest every day."

Greg was 30 in 2004, married with a son and working as an operations manager for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis, when he had a seizure. You can never picture yourself sitting in that chair, hearing the news that you are stage four. You can never picture yourself wheeled into surgery if you've never been under the knife.

You can't picture yourself dying and leaving an 8-month-old son.

"My son was the driving force. I needed to be there for him," Greg said. "I had three treatment options and I chose the most aggressive. I was really sick for a year with chemo once a month for 12 cycles. The chemo comes out of your pores. You taste it. You urinate it.

"But after a few MRIs, it was clear. Now I go every three months (for an MRI). I live three months at a time."

Textbooks say there is a 100 percent chance the tumor will return. "Do I believe it? No. I don't believe it, as well as I don't believe the 5 percent stats."

He began to look at life differently. His former wife ignored his struggle with cancer, he said, and they divorced. He took a severance from his job. By late 2008 he awoke to a reality.

"Why am I here?" he asked. "I shouldn't be here. God must have a good reason. So in the first week of 2009 I started a website for cancer survivors. I had thousands of hits the first months. I started to go visit them in Cleveland, in Chicago, any place I knew someone that had a brain tumor community."

He remarried and kept going. They live off Lisa's wages and credit cards now. Although the nonprofit Greg's Mission he established in 2012 is seeking donations, he has come to the point where he needs a paying job.

What he got back is worth more than money.

Greg tells caregivers — wives, parents and friends — to keep the home odor-free to cut down on nausea. He tells the people with cancer how they can expect to feel, that they may "hit a wall" just when they think they are better.

He tells them, "You have to have the right mindset. It's more than a tumor. It's a way of life.

This is what you have. Maybe you are tired but give it another day. That hole in your head is still there. People need to understand. You are not the same person you were. You will never be your old self again."

Greg has testified before the U.S. Congress, lobbying for chemotherapy parity — similar costs for different methods — and for reciprocity between states when a treatment is offered by another state but not covered by public aid.

The smiles when he walks into a hospital room are the biggest payback, though.

"I want to make sure nobody is going this alone," he said. "By this I mean, not a doctor or family member, but someone who has been through it, who knows what they are going through."

Now they write on his website, how they are inspired by how Greg has turned tragedy into triumph. They write how he was good news. They write how he helped their father or daughter stay positive. They write, too, to tell him their loved one has died. That's the tough part.

A friend of Justin Baker's wrote, too. He found Greg when his buddy needed him most. Baker, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was diagnosed with glioblastoma in April 2011. He had surgery to remove it, but he took a turn for the worse and had lost hope.

When Greg walked in it was as if the room filled with hope, Baker said. He told him not to give up, to remain positive. He had survived. Justin could, too.

"Everything you see on the Internet is bad news. You meet someone like him, and it's very uplifting," Baker said.

Medicine is only 50 percent of the battle, Greg said. The rest is your mindset.

"They look at me and think, 'he is alive.' I have beat it — well, not beat it — but I'm living with it. So seeing is believing," Greg said.

Greg's example led Baker to seek out others to help, including a Wisconsin girl who was recently diagnosed.

"I've learned that I don't want to pity myself as long as I can get out of bed," Baker said.

Lisa and Greg and those he mentors are bound by their medical challenges, but it's been more than that.

In each other they have found a vision, a way of being, while waiting for doctors to say what they must every few weeks.

"If it comes back, we will deal with it. There is no sense worrying about it," Lisa said. "We just get out and enjoy the time we have."

They have learned that is how you live one day that matters, then the next, without a guarantee that there will be a day after that.

They have all learned they need each other.