KEY POINTS:
To get through 21 years without making the acquaintance of Lady Luck seems like bad management. Or a symptom of a mis-spent youth. In the case of Jeffrey Thumath, his lack of good fortune has probably been governed by geography.
Lady Luck doesn't show her face much in
the west Auckland suburb of Massey, where Thumath has lived all his life and where power pylons, the ugliest wart of human progress, stalk the land.
Maybe if he had been raised in more leafy boulevards, his life would have followed an altogether less dramatic path. He'd maybe not have been diagnosed with testicular cancer at 17 and spent the last four years hanging around hospital wards, surgery theatres and, on two desperately sad days, attending the funerals of close friends Cameron Duncan and Charles Hetaraka.
But maybe, without the last four years, he wouldn't have been able to fly round the track this weekend with the same sense of purpose and speed.
Somehow Thumath has taken the injustice, the pain, the sadness, the anger and the frustration of his unfeasibly long battle with cancer and converted it into a positive energy cocktail that could yet see him fulfil his dream of representing the New Zealand athletics team at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
He returned to competitive action last month and has looked sharp enough over 200 metres. A bit more tinkering with his long jump and he reckons he'll be leaping around 7.70m by the end of the season.
"Now it seems that everything is coming right," says Thumath. "I'm starting a new chapter which is training hard and moving on to bigger and better things.
"Training is a big stress reliever. I just wait for training and let it all out there. It's instant relief. If I'm feeling angry, stressed or upset, I take it all out at training and by the end of it, I've rubbed it out and moved on.
"I feel pain during training but it is good pain compared with what I had and all the emotional stress. I prefer this pain."
It's hardly surprising Thumath prefers the endorphin-based pain of training to the cold ache of the surgeon's blade or the hot burn of chemotherapy. It's hardly surprising he's keen to start a new chapter, as the old one was riddled with rotten, rotten twists.
He left normal teenage life behind when his mum walked into his bedroom in March 2002 and caught sight of his distended testicle. Just a few hours later, he learned he had cancer and it had spread to his stomach and lungs.
He would need surgery and chemotherapy and even then he was not a great chance to emerge with his life. He dropped 13kg during his treatment and just as the doctors felt he was getting on top of the disease, they discovered a benign tumour in his stomach that was 16cm by 19cm - the size of a rock melon.
He went back under the knife and by the end of 2002, although so frail he was in danger of being blown away by a stiff gust of wind, he was cleared to get on the track.
His primary school friends and near neighbours, Duncan and Hetaraka, were not making such good progress. All three had been diagnosed with cancer within months of each other and their struggle had brought them close.
After all Thumath had endured, he then had to watch both Duncan, who made a powerful short film, and Hetaraka, lose their respective battles against cancer.
"When we are all diagnosed, we were really close," recalls Thumath. "It put us all back to how we were at primary school. I thought it was my turn when those two died because I thought everything happened in threes. In high school, we lost contact but when we were diagnosed, it brought us back together.
"When they died, it made it bloody hard to be positive. That was the ultimate eye-opener.
"It made it harder to get through everything - but it also gave me more determination to not go down."
He would need that determination.
In March 2003, he broke the 38-year-old Auckland schools' long jump record. He won medals at the national championships and then ran a personal best of 21.29 seconds for the 200m to qualify for the World Junior Games.
By 2004 Thumath was the emerging superstar of New Zealand athletics, destined to wear the famous black singlet and to add another chapter to its proud history.
But cancer proved tougher to beat than the clock or any opponent.
When the surgeon had removed the benign tumour from Thumath's stomach, he'd only been able to get 90 per cent. Usually, the remainder would die naturally.
This was Thumath, though, the man Lady Luck had forgotten and the tumour had grown again. Another had developed in his lungs and they were of a similar size as the initial growth.
They had to come out. There was a five-year window before they could turn cancerous.
The surgery was set for October 2005 and even before Thumath got into theatre, the prognosis was heartbreaking.
"They said that he would most likely lose half a lung and never do athletics again," says Thumath's mother, Gail, who was reeling at the thought that her youngest of four children was going to be robbed of the very thing that he had lived for.
"Jeffrey was under anaesthetic and the surgeon was on the phone to us saying he may lose three-quarters of the lung or maybe even the whole lung and that he may not be able to do athletics any more. And then he said he might be paralysed in the right arm. The tumour had gone into his throat as well.
"After the operation, they rang us up and said he still had a lung. It was so neat going into the x-ray a couple of months later and seeing a clear lung," Gail Thumath said."
For the first time in three-and-a-half years, Thumath could see a future that didn't involve white coats and waiting rooms.
"It's a relief not having to think about my next surgery. It is more now that I have an appointment in six months and I will see what they say then. I had a CT scan the other day and everything looked boring.
"I can push my body a lot more and I know I don't have to worry about any surgery that will affect my training or the goals I have set."
The immediate goal is to secure a place at next year's World Universities Championship in Bangkok. He'll need to bring his 200m time down to 21 seconds flat and find another 40cm in the long jump pit.
He's got plenty of time and a new coach, Gene Pateman, which was an adjustment as painful as his various bouts of surgery.
He'd been working with Paul Lothian since his mid-teens and his former coach had been at his side through the darkest times. But when Thumath got the nod to resume training this April, he felt the relationship was not working.
"I got back into it and I noticed he wasn't there as much. I really wanted to be pushed. I got the all clear but it just wasn't working. It took me about six weeks to leave him. There were so many factors. I eventually told him and it didn't go down too well. It has been four or five months now and we are back on talking terms.
"When I first started training again, I was pretty weak. I was about 40kg behind my group in the weights room but now I'm only about 5kg or 10kg behind. They have been amazed at how quickly my strength has come back."
They probably weren't - they have seen enough of the indefatigable spirit to know that Thumath will defy even the longest odds.
In early 2003, still underweight and sore, he travelled to the national school championships supposedly as a supervisor. When he got there, though, he knew he had to compete and his entry was pushed through the night before the event and his kit couriered down.
His blood still thick with Bleomicin, the chemo drug that scars lungs, he came fifth in the long jump and made the semifinals of the 100m.
"He's just too determined and knows what he wants to do," says his mother. "He's always been positive. There was only one time when he was sick that he thought 'why me' type thing. All the way through, he's been positive.
"I'll say 'here we go off to a CT scan, let's hope nothing shows up' and he'll say 'nothing is showing up, I'm fine'. We didn't want to show any negative side when he was going through it all but there were a couple of times when he went into the last operation when we were worried. He's missed the odd big competition because of his illness. But to actually achieve his goals would be fabulous. I'm convinced he will do it."
That conviction has stemmed from exposure to Thumath whose confidence has been infectious. Thumath never wavered over the last four years. He never doubted that one day his fight with cancer would belong in the past. "I always thought that every operation I had, I would be waking up. The last operation I had I was joking that I would see everyone on the other side."
Now he's on the other side, he's focused on two major goals; a Bachelor of Physical Education at AUT and making it to New Delhi in 2010.
Thumath has endured too much to collapse on the summit of his own Everest and who knows, maybe Lady Luck might turn up and ease the burden of the journey.
The Life And Times
* Has run 10.65s for 100m.
* Has a personal best of 21.29s for 200m.
* Can long jump 7.36m.
* Represented New Zealand at the World Junior Games in 2004.
* Has won the 100m in both the junior and senior divisions at New Zealand Secondary Schools Championships.
* Has won the long jump at under-18 and under-20 national championship as well as medals in 100m and 200m.
* Diagnosed with stage 3 testicular cancer at age 17 in March 2002.
* Had testicle removed and chemotherapy.
* A benign tumour the size of a rock melon was removed from his stomach in October 2002.
* Two more tumours removed from his stomach and lung in October 2005.
