Mike Vigeant Celebrating 25 Cancer-Free Years

It is high noon on one of those Saturdays in May we dream about through the darkness of winter.

Mike Vigeant and friends Jeff Donofrio, Andrew Dorin and John Kaminski are having lunch at the Waterview Café after their regular round of golf at . The foursome grumbled lightly about a solid, if not spectacular scorecard, and Vigeant, as always, was all smiles.  

This year, the smiles might be a little wider and hold a little longer for the 38-year old husband and father of two who was diagnosed with stage-four Hodgkin’s Disease and given six months to live when he was 12. This has been a year of reflection for Vigeant, who grew up in Manchester and currently resides just over the town line in Glastonbury with his wife Heather, 5 ½ year-old daughter Grace and son Austin, who was born in February.

“Twenty-five was always the goal number for me,” said Vigeant , who is the president of Meridian based Center for Research and Development and plays to an eight handicap. He is serving his fifth year on the board of directors at the country club where he worked in high school and through college. “Twenty-five years from the day I was in official remission, for whatever the reason was always the number.”

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Vigeant received the bad and ill-advised news in February 1986 and shaped his life around that defining moment in the doctor’s office.

“My mother and I were sitting at the table across from his desk and the doctor looked at my mother and said ‘Michael has six months to live,’” Vigeant said with unblinking blue eyes 26 years later. “He didn’t look at me, he looked at my mother. So I basically said go (expletive) yourself - you are wrong. And he said, ‘even if Michael does live, physical sports, any of that stuff are off the table.’ So I said if there are two sports I absolutely can’t play, what would they be? Football and hockey. It was at that point I went and signed up for ECHO hockey. I said, ‘if I’m going to go, I’m going to go on my terms.’ We were big Whalers fans - Graham (Dalrymple) and I we were already playing street hockey doing our thing.”

The chemotherapy and radiation treatments took one year to complete and by December 1987, Vigeant was declared cancer-free. By 1992 when he celebrated his fifth cancer-free year, Vigeant had made himself a decent hockey player and was playing for Manchester High with Dalrymple, who was a constant companion throughout his treatment. The two remain close friends and still play hockey in the men’s league in Bolton.

The doubting doctor also said that Vigeant would not be able to have children. He now has two.

“The big question mark from day one till 5 ½ years ago was whether I would have children or not,” Vigeant said.  “So there was, you won’t play sports, which we proved wrong; there was you probably won’t have children and you may have some heart minor problems. So, I have children, played sports, I do have a heart condition and I essentially stopped growing in seventh grade.”

Vigeant doesn't let any of that nonsense get in his way. He graduated from Sacred Heart University with a degree in marketing and communications and went to work for Jerry Lindsley, who was his mentor and camp counselor at Camp Rising Sun in Hebron during the cancer year.

He told Lindsley, “I’d kind of like to talk for a living, I don’t want to sell anything. I went to school for marketing and advertising” and Lindsley said he had the perfect gig for him. Vigeant didn’t know how much he would be making or if he would have benefits, but had faith in his mentor. Eleven years later, Vigeant bought the full service marketing and research public policy consulting firm and founded the Center for Research, Inc. in 2009.

Over the years, Vigeant has given back. He and friends Kenny DeNicolo and Ben Golas raised over $40,000 for the American Cancer Society through golf marathons in the 1990s and he has counseled others in similar situations.

Writing a book had been suggested to him many times over the past four or five years and Heather kept putting the idea in front of him. Several hours before he was to play in a golf tournament, the outline came to him.

“I woke up at three in the morning and it literally popped into my head,” he said. “I got up, walked into my home office and began jotting down a 32 chapter outline to a book. I’ve just recently started writing the actual chapters. The goal is to have the first draft of that book in writing and bring it to a publisher by the end of the year and get the process going.”

Vigeant would like to see a portion of the proceeds of any book sales go to the children’s hospital in the state the book was sold and would eventually like to morph into a career as a motivational speaker. 

“I would really like to speak for a living and energize people - whether it's illness, patients or companies or employees and motivate people with my gift to speak and get people to do whatever it is they do a little bit better.”

In Vigeant’s world, it’s high noon on a Saturday in May every day.