Living every minute to the fullest
Olympic skeleton hopeful, 36, is an ER doctor and cancer survivor
CALGARY — Dr. Lanette Prediger routinely logs 12- hour shifts at the South Calgary Health Centre before driving across town, jumping on a skeleton sled and sliding late into the night under the lights at Canada Olympic Park.
The 36- year- old somehow balances full-time hours as an emergency-room doctor with life as a member of the Canadian national skeleton team.
The hours of sleep are low. The mileage on her car is high. The downtime is non-existent.
“Trying to be an Olympian is hard,” says Prediger, who is competing with athletes more than 10 years her junior this weekend for the right to represent Canada on the World Cup circuit. “Trying to be an Olympian and a practising physician is even harder. I really do believe in milking life for all it’s worth. I just love to adventure and try new things. You plan for the future, but you live for the moment.”
Plan for the future, live for the moment: that’s been Prediger’s mantra since she found herself a cancer patient at age 23 in her second year of medical school. The diagnosis came by chance. During class, students teamed up to practise lymph node exams. Prediger’s partner discovered a node around her clavicle.
Concerned, but not alarmed, she flew to Kolkata that summer to take a neurology elective at a government hospital in India’s second-largest city. Upon returning home, she discovered more misplaced nodes, so she went for what she thought was a routine chest X-ray and blood work.
The next morning, she was told to report to an oncologist. The specialist diagnosed her with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells.
“I didn’t have anyone there with me at the doctor’s office,” she says. “It was shocking. It was devastating.”
Prediger staggered to the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine and cried on the shoulder of Adele Meyers, the program co-ordinator and unofficial den mother.
With scheduling around treatments — and support from Meyers, the faculty and fellow students — Prediger graduated on time with the rest of her class.
Through the experience, Prediger learned how to tackle the seemingly impossible by breaking it into parts.
“If you look at, like ‘ Oh man, I have to go through six months of chemotherapy, and I have to lose all my hair,’ then it would have been too overwhelming,” she says. “I looked at it one day at a time, and it just all added up.”
Around that time, she watched one of her friends ping-pong down the track at Canada Olympic Park. A natural athlete from Oxbow, Sask. — she had played volleyball and ran track — Prediger fancied the idea of hurling herself down a canyon of ice on what amounts to a glorified cafeteria tray. But getting out of bed proved a challenge.
“Talk about a major change going from being a varsity volleyball player in college to it becoming a big achievement to walk around the block,” she says.
So she put the dream on hold until late 2006 when, inspired by Mellisa Hollingsworth’s bronze medal at the Turin Olympics, she signed up for skeleton school.
The early years were bumpy, physically and metaphorically. Many nights, she went home with cuts and bruises from crashes.
“I didn’t have the greatest results in the beginning,” she says. “But I loved it. It was the coolest hobby ever.”
For Prediger, skeleton serves as the ultimate stress reliever from life in the emergency room.
“It’s tough when you’re dealing with life-and-death situations,” she says. “I don’t know if you ever get used to it. I know I haven’t. But when I get to the track, I have to be 100 per cent focused on skeleton. If you’re not 100 per cent focused, you could be in serious danger.”
After a slow and steady climb through the rankings, Prediger finally cracked the World Cup team last year at age 35. She’s ranked 11th in the world and slid to a 10th-place finish at the 2015 world skeleton championships in Germany.
“There must be an adrenalin junkie in her,” Hollingsworth says. “Being an emergency room doctor, I can’t imagine the pressure and the adrenalin that’s going up and down every minute of her shift. I think she can pull from those experiences. When she stands on top of the skeleton track, even though there’s pressure, she can have that perspective of what happens in real life.”
Trying to be an Olympian is hard. Trying to be an Olympian and a practising physician is even harder.
DR. LANETTE PREDIGER SKELETON ATHLETE