“I started chemotherapy on May 2, 1985,” said Michael Crossland, 38, who was diagnosed with cancer at just 11 months of age.
The doctors at Coffs Harbour Hospital touched his stomach and said, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” They scanned him, and Crossland was sent off to a Sydney Hospital for immediate treatment to save his life.
Born and raised in the surfing village of Sawtell on the east coast of Australia, Crossland was deprived of the typical life of a little boy. He wasn’t given the chance to have friends or be at school—the hospital was the only life he knew.
“My mom begged and pleaded with the doctors not to give me chemo on my first birthday. My first dose of chemo was on my very first birthday,” he told The Epoch Times. “We would have to get on a train nine hours every single week because we couldn’t afford to get a plane.”
His upbringing was a roller-coaster ride of battling illness into adulthood. He is now a warrior and an inspirational speaker who gives hope to others across the globe. Life imparted a soul-crushing lesson that the person next to the bed is the one who hurts the most.
That person was often his mom.
Her dauntless spirit has something to do with how he turned out. She would always tell him, “Everything’s going to be okay,” regardless of what the doctors said.
“Two years of being on that chemo cycle, we were informed that the drug was no longer doing the job,” Crossland said. “The tumor had good resistance and had taken over half my body. It was going up into my aorta, wrapping around my heart, and wrapping around my spine.”
In 1988, his mom was asked if she wanted to carry him into the theater because it might be the last time she got to hold her son alive. Undergoing a six-hour surgery, he flatlined and came back.
When surgery failed, an American doctor prescribed trial drugs called DTIC. “It burned me inside and out,” Crossland said. The drugs prescribed were far from a sure thing; a full 24 out of 25 children who took them did not survive. His mom made the gut-wrenching choice to try. Now a dad, Crossland can’t even imagine.
Yet again, her stoic words proved prophetic.
“I think she wanted to manifest an outcome,” Crossland said. “I think she wanted to tell the universe that everything was going to be okay. And I think she just wanted her little boy to stay brave.”
Her optimism—seeing the glass 4 percent full when the doctors saw it “realistically” 96 percent empty—was well founded. “‘I don’t want to see the glass that’s so empty; I want to see that little bit that is still in there,’ and that’s the way she’s approached everything in her life and all the challenges,” Crossland said. “She had really a tough upbringing, and I think that hard times create tough people. She’s certainly that person.”
Mental state, he believes, is half the battle in overcoming life’s challenges.
“I had blisters all over. I was wrapped in bandages,” he said. “However, [the drug] burned all the cancer cells, and I was cancer free in ’89.” He was told he would never play sports though because his body was exhausted and his immune system fried.
These ordeals were just an entré for what followed.
He had his first heart attack when he was 12. On being brought to the hospital, an onslaught of germs and bacteria caused him to contract glandular fever, chicken pox, and pneumonia. “That’s when my body just shut down,” he said. “I started to make friends; I started to go out, going to the beach; I started enjoying life, and then all of a sudden I was back in the hospital.” After getting a taste of normalcy, it was stripped away.
He‘d dreamt of playing baseball in America, which he’d watched in the hospital, but was told he would never play sports again because of damage to his heart.
Again, his mother told him everything would be okay. Sure enough, it was.
Crossland proved the doctors wrong in 2001 when at age 17 he graduated from high school and was playing college baseball in Austin, Texas, for Concordia on a scholarship. But less than six months later, his heart failed after a game. He never played baseball in America again.
He moved back to Sawtell because his health was not in a good place. “It was just the deterioration of the outer muscles around the heart that were affected by the trial drug that I had as a baby,“ he said. ”Exposure to stress from the high expectation of effort when it comes to that level was the cause.”
But this was not the end, his whole life was before him. More success and setbacks lay ahead.
A documentary about Crossland’s life was broadcast on Australian TV. He eventually joined the corporate world, working for a bank and climbing the ladder for four years—until the then-23-year-old found himself rubbing shoulders with the CEO of General Electric. But even driving a fancy $150,000 sports car and wearing Armani suits and Rolex watches, Crossland felt empty in his heart.
After the global financial crisis hit, he plunged into despair. His mom and dad separated, and Crossland invested all his mom’s money only to lose nearly everything. “I put her in a caravan park or a trailer; that’s all I could afford. Then I tried to sell my house and everything I owned, but the problem is the debt was more than the value of the properties,” he said. “That’s when I spiraled. That’s when I got really sick.”
In 2010, he contracted bacterial meningitis and suffered from fluid on the brain.
In the abyss, a light flickered on. He realized that a person’s two greatest days are 1) “the day we are born,” and 2) “the day we discover why we’re born.”
“I think often we discover why we are born in our darkest days,” he said. “To me that was my darkest days.”
He realized he had two things to master to restore light to his world. One was the gift of giving. “It’s not about having a big house. It’s about having a big heart, about getting out of bed knowing I can help somebody live their life better,” he said.
The other was giving peace. “I always thought that the more you give the more you shall receive, but I understand that the more you do it expecting nothing in return, the more you shall receive.” That means mowing your neighbor’s lawn without the neighbor knowing you mowed it, he said.
After realizing these things, doors started to open. Crossland devoted his days to helping the world the best way he knew how. He flew to Haiti—where nobody could ever repay him—and opened an orphanage for 44 kids. He helped one little boy, who subsisted on a bowl of rice every two days and lived on the streets, to graduate from high school. That boy now has a scholarship to study engineering in Brazil, Crossland said.
“I think that’s when things started to open up,” he said. “I started to get really clear with my message and got an opportunity to speak here, there, and everywhere.”
He began receiving invitations to America and Australia to speak about how hardship can be embraced as an opportunity. He has toured with the likes of Richard Branson, the Dalai Lama, and Tony Robbins; his biggest gig has been speaking before 15,000 people at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
However, in 2016 he got so busy he failed to notice a lump in his neck. “They found more tumors in my throat,” he said. “I just bought my mother a house, which was just one of the coolest days in my life, and then all of a sudden the world came crashing down. I arranged my funeral; I did a video message saying goodbye to my family.”
This time, it was Crossland’s turn to tell his mom, “Everything is going to be okay.”
Lo and behold, it was. Surgery successfully removed the cancer. There was one tumor left, but it was benign. “It was around my vocal cords,” he said. “They didn’t want to risk me not being able to speak, considering that is my source of income.”
Since then, Crossland has written two books about his life and philosophy—the one his mother imparted to him. Although last month he was diagnosed with six more tumors, he informed us recently that surgery was “a huge success.”
The dad from a little surfing village on the east coast of Australia is now envisioning what comes next.
“I’ve already got events booked for late December, and I’m back to America. I’ve got a really big event in Arizona on the seventh of January, and then again I’m in Vegas in February,” he said. “My beautiful son goes to school next year, so I want to make sure I can be there on his first day.”
