FEATURE Rasmussen on the summit of Uhuru Peak in Tanzania. Africa's highest point and the world's highest free-standing mountain. Courtesy Jeff Rasmussen
WWW.BENDSOURCE.COM / AUGUST 5, 2021 / BEND’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
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From the Wheelchair to the Mountaintop A three-time Ironman champion’s journey from brain cancer to the Andes
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very morning Jeff Rasmussen wakes up, looks himself in the mirror and says the same thing: “How am I still here?” “It’s insane. I literally shouldn’t be here,” he says. In November 2012, Rasmussen collapsed in his living room in Palm Desert, California. His girlfriend and her two children happened to be in the room with him and called 911. His son, Chris, 24 at the time, ran every light on the way to Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage and beat the ambulance there. The doctor arrived within 15 minutes and ran an MRI. They discovered that Rasmussen had glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer that occurs in one in 10,000 cancer cases and is almost always lethal. The tumor had grown so big that it had crushed Rasmussen’s brain stem, causing him to collapse and go into a coma. Doctors performed an emergency craniotomy to relieve the pressure and a surgery to remove most of the tumor. But they warned Chris Rasmussen that even if his father woke up, he would most likely be paralyzed, or lose his ability to speak or see. He was in a coma for six or seven days. Then one day, he woke up. “I woke up, looked at my son and
By Maggie Miles said, ‘Where the hell am I?” He was not used to being in this setting. He was a world traveler, a threetime Iron Man champion and had just climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, part of the Seven Summits Challenge. When he found out his diagnosis, he read the statistics on survival. “It was dismal,” he says. According to statistics, he had two, maybe three months to live. According to the stories he read online, most of the people died within a year. He read about one person who had just been diagnosed with the same thing and had moved to Oregon to schedule their own death. “I read all of that and was like, ‘Oh hell no, I’m going down swinging,” says Rasmussen. “Because to me…this is heaven on Earth. I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of catastrophe down here in this mortal experience, but I mean…it’s beautiful. I was never the kind of guy who needed the cancer-death-bed lesson to learn how awesome and precious life is.” Before he found out he had cancer, he would sit out on his patio, drink his coffee and enjoy the hummingbirds visiting his bird feeder. He would look at a strawberry and think about how it was the only fruit with the seeds on the outside.
“And you’re looking at that strawberry, like, wow—everything is a miracle. To me either everything is a miracle or it’s one big accident,” says Rasmussen. His best friend of 20 years, Christan Nguyen, a psychotherapist based out of Huntington Beach who happens to be a happiness researcher and is current-
buy something to eat, even if it meant he couldn’t eat himself. “I would say, 'Jeff, you’ve got to stop giving away your money to other people. You need to eat too!'” he says. Rasmussen would always tell him that it was OK, that he had enough money to buy some bananas. According to Nguyen, Rasmussen would con-
"I read all of that and was like 'Oh hell no, I’m going down swinging.'" —Jeff Rasmussen ly getting his Ph.D. in the subject, has been searching the world for the happiest people on Earth, and Jeff, he says, is one of his prime subjects. “And I’m really picky about who I consider truly happy,” he says. “But Jeff has been consistently happy for 20 years.” He and Rasmussen were roommates at one point, and he says part of the reason he thinks Rasmussen is so happy is his selflessness, which Nguyen experienced many times while living with him. He often saw him give away all of his money to others to be able to
stantly live off of nuts and bananas so that he could make sure other people could eat. Once Nguyen said he gave Rasmussen his Lexus, and Rasmussen ended up giving it away to someone else. Rasmussen would visit with Nguyen’s mother for hours just sitting with her and watching TV so she wasn’t alone while Nguyen was traveling for work, just to make sure she was OK. “She didn’t speak any English, and he didn’t speak a word of Vietnamese. But it didn’t matter. He was happy to just sit there with her and keep her
