Tour star's mom also a survivor

Let's get the dish out of the way, shall we?

Kate Hudson. Thoughts?"If he wants to date Kate Hudson," Linda Armstrong Kelly says of her son, Lance, "then I think it's wonderful."

And?

"And she's a great mom."

I wanted to ask Kelly about her almost-daughter-in-law, Sheryl Crow, (what happened there, really?) then decided against it.

We were, after all, just steps away from What Really Matters: The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where Kelly, 55, spoke Saturday to members of the Survivorship Program about overcoming not only cancer, but the hardships that hit healthy lives, as well.

"I was a survivor from the minute I was born," Kelly said the other day.

She was born in Texas, raised poor and got pregnant and married at 17. She ended up raising Lance on her own while working two jobs and driving him to endless athletic events.

"Lance saw, early on, that hard work paid off," she said.

There's an understatement.

Lance Armstrong would go on to win the Tour de France seven times, but not before overcoming testicular cancer that had spread to his brain.

Armstrong once told Forbes Magazine that he wouldn't have won a single race without the lessons cancer gave him.

"Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living ... that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things, whether health or a car or an old sense of self, has its own value in the scheme of life," Armstrong said in the 2001 article. "Pain and loss are great enhancers."

He also gained first-hand knowledge of what recovering cancer patients need — which is why, in 2005, he came to Seattle to announce that his foundation was giving the program $1 million.

The Survivorship Program is the first in the region to offer clinical care, education and research opportunities to patients who have survived cancer and are not in active treatment, or are in long-term therapy to prevent recurrence.

"We didn't have a center for information or programs," Kelly said of her son's recovery. "So because of that, the foundation has a real eye to what's needed."

She loves to meet fellow survivors: "Even though I never had cancer, I had cancer," she said. "You have to embrace the disease. Denial is everything."

And yet, it makes no sense to linger on the past, she said.

So Kelly lives large back home in Plano, Texas. She plays a lot of golf, makes a legendary banana bread and talks to her son a couple of times a week. He's on the road a lot.

So is she, and always with a case of the famous yellow "LiveStrong" wristbands that started an international fundraising trend. Kelly even gives them out at Halloween.

It's a smile now, she said. Blonde starlets and yellow bracelets everywhere.

But it was hell for a long time for her and Lance, who was diagnosed 12 years ago.

"I don't think it's fair to let everyone believe that this was easy," Kelly said. "You see me now, but nobody started here.

"Once you move on, though, so much comes into your life."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Her bracelet is blue, for Crohn's.