Weary and bruised, Chuck Pagano submitted blood work four weeks into the Colts’ 2012 season. His team doctor booked an oncologist appointment and told him to bring his wife, Tina, for support.
The next day after practice, the then-Colts coach was preparing to leave for the oncologist when someone asked where Tina was.
Truth is, Pagano never told her about the appointment.
“I was in total denial,” said Pagano, who’s in his first year as the Bears’ defensive coordinator.
He finally called his wife. She got in the car and picked him up from practice. The ride to Indiana University Simon Cancer Center was strange. Pagano assured his wife that he was healthy — “I don’t have anything, trust me,” he said — even though they both knew he’d felt weak for months. Tina told her husband that it wouldn’t make sense for him to land his dream job, then be struck by an illness.
“There had to be a reason for something like this,” she said. “And there was.”
They just didn’t know it yet.
For the last seven years, Chuck and Tina Pagano have been an instrumental part of the fight to treat and cure blood cancer. Their journey started the day they walked into the oncologist’s office and learned Chuck had acute promyelocytic leukemia. The disease had a high cure rate, and Chuck eventually beat it.
The diagnosis shook him to the core. He called his three daughters and his bosses. His wife registered him under the pseudonym of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He didn’t leave the hospital for 26 days.
“It’s just like getting hit across the head with a baseball bat,” he said.
Pagano tried to stay strong for his family, even as chemotherapy withered his body to the point where, he said, he looked 100 years old. His family tried to hold it together for him.
“You try to make your faith stronger than your fear every day,” Tina said, “but it’s a struggle.”
Tina, who rarely left her husband’s side during treatment, went to Lucas Oil Stadium before the Colts’ first game after treatment began. She brought a blue T-shirt back to him, the kind the Colts and Packers wore while they warmed up.
It said “ChuckStrong.”
The couple watched his team’s game together at the hospital — the first time they’d ever done so together. When the Packers led 21-3 at halftime, Chuck gave his wife a halftime pep talk. The Colts outscored the Packers 27-6 the rest of the way and won 30-27.
“To watch them come back,” he said, “was pretty special.”
The Paganos, who moved to Indianapolis less than a year before Chuck’s diagnosis, remain amazed by the support they received during treatment. They still have boxes filled with letters they received.
They vowed to pay it forward, and the “ChuckStrong” rallying cry stuck. From the moment Chuck returned to work late in the 2012 season, he and Tina have been committed to providing support — and raising money — to fight cancer.
“When you get on the other side of it and you come through it, during that time you’re like, ‘If I have the opportunity to do the same for somebody else, I will,’ ” he said. “That presented itself. It’s very humbling. It’s such a great honor to help others.”
The cause followed them to Chicago, where Chuck landed a year after the Colts fired him.
In May, a Bears contingent — including chairman George McCaskey, coach Matt Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace — drove to Indianapolis to attend the seventh annual ChuckStrong Tailgate Gala. The event has raised $7.3 million for cancer research.
Children with the disease hit the Paganos the hardest. Chuck still wears rubber bands around his wrist of kids he has met who eventually succumbed to cancer.
“I call it survivor’s guilt — the ones that didn’t make it, he’d be down for days,” Tina said. “Even now, it just affects you. You don’t wish it on anybody, especially children. . . . That’s why he and I made the commitment.”
Cancer is the “animal that keeps coming back,” Pagano said.
“That’s why we’re here. . . . So nobody has to say goodbye.’’
The Paganos know the stress that comes with family tragedy. Pagano’s sister Cathy died in a car accident when she was 22.
“You learn to cope,” he said. “Birthdays are always going to come. Christmas is going to come. All these memories are going to come flooding back. You just got to keep moving forward. You got to keep living.”
The Bears talk to their players about leaving a legacy. The Paganos hope their work fighting cancer and inspiring patients is what they’re remembered for someday.
“We were all put here for one reason and one reason only,” Pagano said. “And that’s to serve others.”
Sports can be a great unifier. When Pagano met Cole Spiegel, an 11-year-old from Wheaton, they had more to talk about than just cancer. Cole — who has Gorlin syndrome, through which skin cancer develops — wants to be a sports broadcaster when he grows up. He can’t play many sports because of his condition, which is not terminal.
“He knows his stuff,” Chuck said. “He knows football. He’s sharp.”
Cole and his dad, Dan, met Chuck in October through Tackle Cancer, a partnership program involving the Bears, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and CDW.
“Cole and his family — and all the people we’ve been able to come across and meet and become a part of their lives — have become really special,” Pagano said. “You have a tough loss. . . . There’s some real-life stuff going on.”
There was a time when that real-life challenge — cancer — shook the Paganos to their core.
Now they can’t imagine life without it.
“I think when we look back on it now, it almost seems like a blessing,” Tina said. “Like Chuck always says: ‘It happened for us — and not to us.’ ”
