“If I’m not dying, I better go live.” Christy Erickson’s cancer diagnosis led to life as a motorcyclist and strongman competitor

Christy Erickson was seven years old when her mom lost a three-year battle with breast cancer.

“Most of my memories of her are of her being in some form of treatment,” said Erickson, who is currently a stay-at-home mom of two teenagers in Macon, Georgia. 

Erickson grew up knowing that she might face the same fate as her mom. Breast cancer had a stronghold on Erickson’s family tree, so discussions of mastectomies and BRCA testing were common in her childhood home. 

In 2000, when Erickson was 25, she visited a breast specialist to discuss her potential risk for breast cancer. She feared that she would put her soon-to-be husband and future children through the same difficulties that she had experienced with her mom. Although Erickson had tested negative for BRCA mutations, the specialist recommended that she receive a baseline mammogram that day. 

During the appointment, an ultrasound uncovered a pea-sized lump in one of her breasts. 

“That was just like a ding for me, because when my mom found hers, she had a pea-sized tumor, and 10 of 12 lymph nodes were already malignant,” Erickson said to Deborah Doroshow, associate professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Doroshow, who is also a historian of medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the Cancer History Project. Doroshow’s conversation with Erickson is available on the Cancer History Project podcast.

Although Erickson’s lump was deemed benign, she elected to have a mastectomy the following year as a preventative measure. 

“Between prayer and having the surgery, I felt like I did whatever I could do,” she said. “There was this sense of, ‘Okay, I don’t smoke. I’m not in any other risk factors that I know of. I should be fine.’” 

Just a few years later, however, in 2006, a scan from an unrelated procedure revealed spots in her lungs. Erickson had given birth to her first child only a year before. 

She received a biopsy at a local hospital in Macon. Health professionals there thought Erickson likely had lung cancer. So many tumors dotted her CT scan images that the hospital workers estimated she only had a few months to live. 

But biopsy results from Mayo Clinic in Arizona came back negative for cancer. Erickson was told to simply have regular screenings and keep an eye on her health. 

“It was hard and strange at the same time, because I didn’t have a single doctor directing what was going on,” she said. 

A local internist provided Erickson some medical direction, but she was not given a concrete plan for which doctors to see and how often to get screenings. “It was just like, ‘Oh, if you ever need us, we’re here,’” Erickson recalled. 

A decade later, in 2016, Erickson visited another local physician for gastrointestinal issues, who prompted her to seek help managing her lung issues. She reached back out to Mayo Clinic. 

Erickson connected with the same pathologists who worked on her case in 2006, and eventually traveled to Arizona to meet with a thoracic surgeon. Erickson later returned for biopsies in both lungs.

Some of her tumors turned out to be malignant. 

Erickson assumed that she would find an oncologist at Mayo Clinic and regularly fly across the country for treatment. But a physician there suggested that Erickson meet with an oncologist much closer to home—Suresh Ramalingam at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. 

Right before Erickson’s first appointment with him that fall, her genetic testing results came back and revealed that Ramalingam was not merely conveniently located. 

“It turned out that I had the EGFR and the T790M mutation,” Erickson said. “And he’s like the person. He would be the most appropriate oncologist, really anywhere, for me to see, and we had no idea until I was actually in his office.” 

Erickson began a treatment regimen with osimertinib (Tagrisso), which Ramalingam has been studying in the phase III LAURA trial (The Cancer Letter, June 7, 2024). 

“It’s been so helpful that I can always find out what’s going on in the world of EGFR lung cancer. He can tell me from an expert’s point of view. He’s in the thick of all of this research,” Erickson said. “It just gave me a lot of trust and a lot of hope, and also just a sense of knowing that I’m in the right place.” 

Still, receiving a lung cancer diagnosis after dedicating years to prevention measures pushed Erickson down an emotional spiral. 

“It was kind of a crisis of faith, and a crisis of, ‘What am I going to do, and what’s going to happen to my children?’” Erickson said. She described the feeling as a scene in an old-time cartoon. 

“I walked around, waiting for the piano to smash me into the ground because I just thought, ‘I can’t get away from it. I’ve done everything that I can do, and I can’t get away from it,’” Erickson said. 

But her condition remained stable with osimertinib. Her tumors did not shrink, but they also did not grow. Erickson has now been taking the medication for eight years. 

“There was sort of a point in that [first] year to year and a half that, I think, in my mind, I went to, ‘Okay, well, I’m still here. If I’m not dying, I better go live,’” Erickson said. 

That attitude shift pushed her to think about her lifelong dreams. 

“I’ve embraced this sense of if there’s something that I want to go do, or I want to try, who cares if it sounds crazy, or ridiculous, or out of my league?” Erickson said. 

She started by persuading her husband to let her get a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. 

He would surely be against the dangerous pastime since they had two children, she thought. “So, I sat and wrote an essay about why I wanted to ride,” Erickson said. “We were sitting down one night, and I just handed him the papers, and I said, ‘I need you to read this.’” 

Realization hit him as he began to scan the papers. “After reading the whole thing, he looked up and said, ‘Are you going to play the cancer card to get a motorcycle?’” Erickson recalled. 

“If it works, I am,” she responded. And it did. 

“I remember the first appointment with Dr. Ramalingam after I had gotten the motorcycle, and he just howled laughing,” Erickson said. “But he was proud of me. I could tell that he was proud that I was taking my life and enjoying it.”

Erickson has recently picked up another extreme hobby: strongman competitions.

During a vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina in spring 2023, she found a local gym advertising the sport. Erickson had recently begun working with a trainer in her hometown, but knew an exercise-free week would make her rusty. 

So, she went to the Hilton Head gym and met with a trainer, who asked about her medical history. Erickson began to explain her health situation. 

“He just kind of froze. It turned out the more we talked, he also had a very unusual form of cancer and had gotten into strongman as a way of defying the sense of ‘It’s over, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I’m afraid,” Erickson said. 

“It was one of those opportunities where it felt like—almost like with Dr. Ramalingam—that this is the right person,” she said. 

Erickson continued her strongman training when she returned home, with the intent of exercising that way for fun. But one month later, she asked her coach, “Could I compete and not embarrass myself?” 

“Hell, yeah!” he responded. 

That was all the encouragement she needed. 

Last October, Erickson competed as a novice in her first strongman competition. She found freedom in being viewed as a regular, cancer-free competitor. But she also acknowledged the importance of showing others what is possible as a cancer survivor. 

Throughout the process, Erickson has become more open about living with cancer. 

“Maybe it’s helpful to see a cancer patient—stage 4 lung cancer—pulling a UPS truck,” Erickson said, reflecting on the competition’s final event. “I think there’s value in other patients seeing patients further along than them continuing to thrive.”