Greg LeMond on the verge of successfully overcoming leukemia: "I feel so much better"

It's been a huge shock for public when three times Tour de France winner and two times World Champion Greg LeMond announced last year, that he was diagnosed with leukemia. According to the American, symptoms started off with severe fatigue. Although LeMond claims he has never really felt healthy since his accident.

"In the first four or five months of last year I told Kathy, ‘I think I am dying,’" LeMond tells Velo on a call from his home in Tennessee. "For two or three years, I’d really been impacted by fatigue, but it got to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed for about two months."

LeMond believes that the reason behing his healths problems is the lead that remained within his body since the hunting accident. On a turkey hunt with his uncle and brother-in-law, LeMond was accidentally shot by the latter, being hit by 60 lead bits, nearly bleeding out. In hospital, they were only able to remove half of the lead due to its complicated position.

"Since I got shot and got all this lead in me, I’ve never felt truly healthy for all those years," LeMond recalls the shooting accident from 1987 which marked his career. "The only time I felt really good and normal was prior to getting shot. It’s kind of crazy but, really, it’s been that long. I haven’t felt on top of it for so long."

"I feel so much better," LeMond told Velo. "The new drug that I’m on, Tasigna, is very effective. If I’m on it, my longevity should be close to normal. Today with cancer, the success rate is 80 to 90 percent. So I’m in that 90 percent range. I’m reacting really well to it."

“Within about three, four months of the treatment I started feeling much better. Really, so much better. It’s a very expensive drug. But thank goodness it is there, because typically you don’t survive these things. The good thing about cancer there’s really ongoing progress, so I’m not too worried about it."

"There are some people called super responders who, with three or four years of taking the drug, they’re cancer free. There’s a chance I’m that type of person," he says. "They are tracking it through a very sophisticated test that can show how things are going. I’ll find out in two months if I am one of those super responders. If I am, that would be great."

"A setback is a setback, and I’ve had a lot of setbacks, including this cancer," he says. "I’m pretty optimistic. You just kind of move on from it. It is what it is. I’m fortunate it’s not more severe. There’s a lot of people who have much worse outcomes than me. I need no empathy."

"I feel so much better. I have energy. I can do stuff. I can think. So that’s good."