His cancer was in his ribs... I believe he had a few ribs removed, and that got rid of it..
Interview quote:
Why did you have to have surgery at the beginning of the season?
I was headed to the shop one day and coughed and had a rib break. I went that following weekend and didn't know exactly what had happened. I went that following weekend and did a mid-south race. We had a lot to test on the '09 bike. After the race was over I was hurting pretty bad. It was hurting to breathe. Something just didn't feel right so I had some x-rays to make sure something too bad wasn't going on. When I did the x-rays it showed a cloudy spot. It led the doctors to take me to get CAT scans run. After that, it was definitely something going on in the rib cage that they didn't know what was going on. The only way to know what was going on was to have surgery. Before surgery I had to make a decision if it was cancerous to give permission to take out the "boundaries," around the cancer. I told them to go ahead and do whatever they thought they were supposed to do. They pulled it out and the specialist looked at it and thought it was very possible it was some kind of cancer. That being said, it required them to take two ribs. The rib the tumor was attached to cut blood supply off to a rib and caused it to decay, and break when I coughed. Biggest thing getting over it is the muscle damage. They declared surgery and took everything out. I go back later this year to take a couple more tests to make sure. Right now doctors confident it's all gone surgery. So, no chemo or anything like that.
