Draney was standing in front of the mirror one day, checking his physique, as his wife had seen him do so many times, when he noticed a lump on his hip. It was 1997.

"I told him to go to a doctor," says Carol.

Draney let another couple of weeks go by; the lump seemed bigger. He visited a longtime family doctor. The X-rays were inconclusive. The radiologist listed a number of possibilities, among them being chondrosarcoma, a type of cancer.

The family doctor scoffed. "No way," he said. "You're the healthiest person I know."

What if it were chondrosarcoma, Draney asked? "Then you're a dead man," the doctor said.

They were old friends, the doctor never considered that Draney really had the disease, but the words came back to haunt them.

Draney, like most athletes who experience soreness, underwent ultrasound treatments, but after a couple of weeks the lump ached. He knew from experience that such a response was odd. He was sent to Logan for an MRI and a bone scan.

"David has cancer," they told Carol.

David was instructed not to go home, but to report immediately to a specialist in Salt Lake City.

"We actually laughed about it," says Carol. "I was saying, 'Can you believe it? — You have cancer.' I didn't know how serious it was."

Draney had always been healthy, but there had been one scare. When he was 15 there was a similar lump on his hip, which surgeons removed and pronounced benign. Almost two decades later, cancer showed up in the same spot.

"The doctor said that's where it originated," says Terryl.

The specialist told Draney that part of his hip would have to be removed. Draney wondered what he would look like, would his pants be crooked, could he still dunk a basketball? "Look," the doctor said, "I don't care what you're going to look like. I'm trying to make sure you'll be around the next 20 years and be with your wife and kids."

"That was his wakeup call," says Carol.

Surgeons removed part of the hip bone and then began the wait to see if the cancer returned.

Anyway, we are totally fine with this especially since we have had a long time to prepare for it and pretty much have all the arrangements planned out or in the works. We joke about it and talk about it commonly, which I am sure people think is strange, but that is how we have chosen to deal with it. I guess we can either laugh or cry and it is a lot more fun to laugh. — Carol