TURIN, Italy — Rena Inoue hadn't felt good for a while. It was 1998, and she'd developed a cough, a persistent one that rattled her 4-foot-10, 95-pound frame.
"And I noticed I got tired easily, much more than I should," said Inoue, who grew up in Japan and had been dispatched to Lake Arrowhead by her country's figure skating federation in 1996 to further her career.
"I thought I had pneumonia or something, so I went to the doctor and checked it."
Her doctor saw a shadow on the X-ray "that didn't really look like pneumonia," she said.
What it did look like was lung cancer, the disease that had killed her father, Masahiko, a year earlier.
"The very, very beginning," said Inoue, who turned 22 in October 1998. "The doctor said, 'You're very lucky.' Normally people don't know they have it at that stage.
"I was kind of OK when I heard it," she said. "I mean, I wasn't happy, but my doctor said he'd found it early. He didn't take it seriously. He didn't say, 'You have to face your death.' "
A six-month course of chemotherapy banished the disease, though she had to stay off the ice for a year and was cautioned that a cold or pneumonia would be dangerous because of her compromised immune system. She went for checkups every six months for the first five years after she was treated but goes once a year now.
"The hardest part was telling my mother," she said of her widowed parent, Reiko. "It had been just a year since my dad died. I said, 'I just cannot tell her.' But I told her. She definitely was freaking out."
Inoue, who competed at the 1992 and 1994 Olympics for Japan and became a U.S. citizen last September, rarely discusses her illness. She told only a few relatives and a close friend in Japan, she said, but word filtered out to the Japanese media, which still track her every move.
John Baldwin Jr., her on- and off-ice partner, joked on Tuesday that in the two weeks before they left for Turin, Japanese reporters had been to their Santa Monica home every day to chronicle her new life as a two-time U.S. pairs champion and three-time Olympian.
"If somebody asks me, I don't hide," she said of her cancer, "but it's not something I would tell anyone."
Ask her, though, about the throw triple axel she and Baldwin performed in winning the U.S. title last month, the first landed in competition anywhere in the world, and she's effusive.
