Bruce Sauer, who loves to joke, earned the nickname “Trouble” during his cancer treatments.

He’s been to half a dozen Major League ballparks, has plans to visit more, lists the Kansas City Royals as one of the only things that can get him to change the channel from Fox News, and walks, talks and entertains a little like an old ballplayer.

So it makes sense that Lawrence resident Bruce Sauer, 61, leans toward baseball to help explain how he beat cancer.

To fully understand the circumstances facing Sauer, who was diagnosed in 2012 with stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, one must recognize that his mother, Alma, and father, Charles, lost their fights with cancer in 1985 and 1997 after being treated by the same oncologist who handled Sauer’s case, Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s Dr. Matthew Stein.

When Bruce Sauer and his wife, Diana, were told in 2012 that Bruce had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he knew he was going to fight. And what a fight it was: Sauer went through 32 sessions of chemotherapy, five spinal taps, two bone marrow biopsies and swallowed roughly 18,000 pills.

“You save me, your average goes to .334,” Sauer joked with Stein at the time of his diagnosis. “I’ll give you the extra point.”

That kind of batting average over a career will get a player into the Baseball Hall of Fame. It gave Sauer a new lease on life and a laundry list of new friends.

“Everybody at the hospital called him ‘Trouble.’ They’d say, ‘Here comes Trouble,’ because he was always just joking with everybody,” says Diana Sauer, Bruce’s wife of 38 years. “He always had a good sense of humor.”

Sauer’s story of survival is a family affair of the most epic proportions. From fighting to honor his late parents to the incredible fortune of having both of his brothers, Stan and Ted, be perfect matches for the stem cell transplant that saved his life, Sauer leaned on everyone from his grandchildren to his wife and children and everyone in between.

It was Stan who stepped up most, offering, without hesitation, to do whatever was needed to save his brother’s life. He later was rewarded by Sauer — after thousands of thank yous, hugs and tears — with a memorable day in a suite at a Royals game.

“He was going to do it no matter what,” Sauer says of Stan’s role in his transplant. “And I would’ve done it in a heartbeat for him.”

In the past three years, Sauer went through 32 sessions of chemotherapy, five spinal taps, two bone marrow biopsies and swallowed roughly 18,000 pills — 52 a day for one six-month period — almost all of them washed down with cinnamon applesauce.

Sauer said he felt his parents with him every step of the way and was hell-bent on winning his fight to honor their memory. There also were people outside of the family who helped Sauer win his battle with cancer.

Bruce Sauer is pictured with grandsons Landon Gillman, 8, and Ethan Sauer, 5, at a Kansas City Royals game.

Tawny Roeder, who, through a stroke of luck, was assigned to be Sauer’s case manager at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, had battled and defeated the exact cancer Sauer was fighting when she was 23.

“She was able to tell him, ‘Don’t do this, make sure you do that,’ and things like that,” Diana Sauer recalls. “They became great friends.”

Whether you’re talking about the helping hand of a new friend or the unyielding love of the people closest to him, Sauer believes they played a huge role in him being here today.

He still has plenty of work to do to get all the way back. And doctors are watching him carefully just to be sure things are right. But Sauer knows they are. He’s turned a corner and is ready to award Stein that extra point on his batting average.

“In the very beginning, he told me, ‘I can treat you and make you comfortable, but I think you want more than that,'” Sauer recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah.’

“I love that man to death.”