BOZEMAN, Montana — In a July 2019 Forum article featuring Adam Schwankl, the former Shanley High School standout basketball player and artist shared his attempts to curb the Hodgkin lymphoma threatening his body.

Now 37 and in remission, he and his wife, Valerie, find themselves amid boxes for the second time this year, recently having moved to a home along the periphery of the Rocky Mountains, while wrangling their young children, Stella, 3, and Sebastian, 1, to barter for some quiet time.

While six years ago, life itself was in question, these days, it’s flourishing.

“You don’t feel super grounded always in the challenges that come up,” Adam admitted of parenthood, noting their third child is due in January.

But he’s not complaining; the couple stands in awe at what has transpired — both in Adam’s health journey and their faith.

Even before children arrived, Adam had approached his cancer with a mind toward fatherhood, choosing treatments that would decrease chances of sterility.

“When Valerie conceived Stella, to me, that was the biggest fruit of doing all that work,” Adam said, noting that the news was “a huge turnaround from the way things had been going.”

The “work” involved a ton of research and, initially, 10 weeks at An Oasis of Healing in Mesa, Arizona, an oncology clinic incorporating both conventional and alternative medicine. Relieved, Adam left with a clear scan.

Contributed / Adam Schwankl

“But then I came back, and there were some things going on with (my career) that I still hadn’t changed,” he said, and soon, the cancer reappeared in new places, “on my neck and under my arms.” He now wonders if God was prompting him to rethink his life’s direction.

Adam returned for 16 more weeks of intense treatment: five to seven-hour days, five days a week. “It was a lot, but the cancer didn’t change,” he said, despite the earlier treatment having eliminated 90 percent or more of the disease from around his heart.

It was time to try a more conventional approach, he decided, but with a milder round of chemo — one-eighth of the usual dose and adding water fasts to increase the treatment’s effectiveness.

The cancer reversed, and soon thereafter, the couple learned Valerie was pregnant. Adam’s health has been stable ever since.

Henri Pellerin met Adam in college around 2007, but in ensuing years, their shared Catholic faith and political values have only strengthened their bond, Henri said.

They were still in their 20s when he drove Adam to Arizona for one of his first treatments so Valerie could work. He wanted it to be fun, so they decided to stop in Moab, Utah, along the way to hike. “We were going off trail and exploring some incredible places,” Henri said, noting Adam’s “experimental, adventurous” spirit.

That spirit surfaced in other moments throughout the cancer journey, including just after Adam learned about his diagnosis. The two were playing two-on-two basketball with another friend — and Adam’s dog.

Contributed / Adam Schwankl

“Adam had trained his dog to pass the ball to him,” Henri recalled, chuckling, and despite Henri’s teammate being a gifted ball player, those two were “destroyed.” “Adam was literally passing the ball to his dog and getting the perfect assists, then driving to the hole.”

The friendship has included plenty of seriousness as well. “(Adam’s) got a very rigorous, philosophical, intellectual understanding of what it is to be Catholic,” Henri said, “so, we’ve had a lot of conversations over the years around that kind of stuff, too.”

Early in their friendship, Henri, a native of Louisiana, had rejected his childhood faith in God.

But Adam’s approach to his cancer left an impression.

“He’s definitely been a central figure in my own faith journey — an inspiration as the most devout person I know, and seeing the role (faith) plays in his life,” Henri said.

For a while, Henri admitted, he thought he might lose his best friend. “For a minute there, his hair was thinning and he was getting smaller, but now he’s back to a baseline of a healthy young man,” he said.

Henri, who considers Adam “an underappreciated artist,” also admires his friend’s creative gifts and has bought quite a few of his pieces for his home. “It’s just good to see him continuing to create beautiful art, beautiful children, and, you know, just living life with a passion,” he said.

During the roughest part of Adam’s health journey, Valerie, a Chinese-medicine doctor, discovered that while a serious illness requires great internal strength, so does being the spouse of someone suffering.

“I was in a really lonely, dark place off and on. It’s almost like you have to tell yourself, ‘There’s no time for this feeling to come up,’ but it’s still happening,” she recalled.

Contributed

One day, while driving alone to meet up with Adam in Arizona, traversing the most desolate spot in the desert, Valerie began lamenting how dreary it all was, when a relative called with good news about her faith journey — something for which Valerie had been praying.

She had to apologize to God, she said, for her lack of trust and poor attitude. “You don’t always know how A and B fit together, but eventually, you can see the collective movement of God’s hand in all of it," she said.

Surrender, Valerie added, has been a key theme throughout. “I had to trust that God was going to take care of (Adam) and lead us to all the solutions we were praying for,” she said.

Ultimately, she feels that the cancer has served a valuable purpose, “healing parts of ourselves and our relationship that had to become strengthened to prepare for the coming chapter,” including raising children, which, Valerie said, can often feel like “taking an exit ramp that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sometimes, though, there’s just so much value in trusting in the detour,” she added, “and once you’re past it, you’re so relieved: ‘We made it!’”

Adam’s journey has led him to want to advocate for others seeking alternative treatments after a cancer diagnosis, including natural compounds proven to block pathways to some cancers and “dramatically improve the efficacy of other treatments,” often at a fraction of the cost of standard remedies.

He recommended Jane McLelland’s, “How to Starve Cancer: Without Starving Yourself,” for those interested in exploring other options.

But a positive mindset can also make a huge difference, Adam said, which can be enhanced through faith, pointing to James in Scripture who “talks often about belief and not doubting,” adding, “there’s a big mental game,” and more scientific evidence demonstrating that prayer and belief can aid in the healing process.

Adam believes his own cancer was a response to a misguidedness in his own life, forcing him to “stop, relocate and deal with what needed to be dealt with” to pave the way to better things.

Now, looking at his children — the fruits of that turnaround — he said, “I can actually say that I’m thankful for the experience. I would never wish that on anyone, but I would certainly go through it again to be able to have my family.”

His art also has helped refocus and heal him, he said, noting that setting up his studio was one of his priorities in their recent move.

Lately, he’s become interested in Western art, reflected in his painting, “Radiant Reverie,” depicting a cowboy on his horse at the end of the day, gazing at a thunderhead at sunset. “He’s reposed in reverie, and looks like he’s been working hard, but there’s a satisfaction in that,” Adam said.

He remains interested in sacred art as well. In fact, he’s open to commissioned work of both sacred and Western themes, separately, or even the two merged.

“I’ve been looking into the early cowboys that were Catholic; the vaqueros,” he said, noting that he’s begun researching the Catholic culture surrounding their world and bridging these artforms.

The creative process, while innate in Adam, is not reserved for a select few, but all human beings are meant to create, Adam said, likening God to the sun, which is “always shining and giving us everything we need,” and bidding us closer through grace, procured “through the sacraments, but also through our daily prayers.”

Throughout his health trials, Adam has discovered that suffering can hasten the reception of this grace; whether in physical obstacles or everyday challenges in child-rearing.

“Parenting draws you out. You realize your life is not about you … it’s got to be about the other,” Adam said, “but ultimately, it’s all about God and the pursuit of God.”