Life was great for Shawn Respert 10 years ago.

He was averaging nearly 26 points a game as a senior for the Spartans and the shooting guard impressed enough people to be the eighth pick in the 1995 NBA draft.

Everything changed toward the end of his rookie season with the Milwaukee Bucks.

His stomach started bothering him, so he altered his diet. But that didn't make the unbearable cramps go away.

"One day I felt a lump the size of a marble below my belly button," Respert said. "After I finally saw a doctor a couple weeks later, the lump had gotten bigger."

When medicine didn't make the lump go away, Respert went through a series of tests at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Milwaukee in May of 1996.

"When the doctor said, 'You have cancer in your abdomen,' I said, 'C'mon. There's no way. I'm 23 and I'm in the NBA,'" Respert recalled during a telephone interview from Houston, where he lives and works. "I was in denial, so I got a second opinion. But then another doctor in Milwaukee verified that I had cancerous cells in my stomach."

Respert underwent radiation therapy every day for three straight months, but his condition didn't improve.

"When doctors then said we had to do more radiation and medicine, that's when reality hit me that this was truly for real," he said. "I had been optimistic before that and was worried about proving that I was worth the eighth pick, but then I started concentrating on just getting healthy."