49, Testicular Cancer Survivor
June 1993. I was sixteen years old. The ACC championship was a few days behind us. I had pitched for a Jesuit high school in Connecticut, gone 9-3 my junior year with 60 strikeouts in 68 innings, and weighed 170 pounds. I threw in the mid-eighties. D1 scouts had been at my games. My coach had written my college recommendation letter that spring. He told the colleges to call him.
I was taking a shower one morning, and I felt an ache that wasn't supposed to be there. I checked. I felt something.
I went to the emergency room with what I thought was a routine problem. A doctor examined me. They drew blood. A nurse came in with the cart, took a few vials, and walked them down to the lab. I did not think about it again. They sent me home with antibiotics and told me to follow up with a urologist in five days.
The urologist examined me briefly. The bloodwork from the ER was on his desk. One number was off the charts. Alpha-fetoprotein. AFP. A protein that healthy adults barely produce. Mine was high enough that he did not need an ultrasound to know what he was looking at.
Stage IIC nonseminoma. Testicular cancer.
I had an orchiectomy at a hospital in Connecticut that week. A bigger surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering a few weeks later, where the surgeon found cancer in seven of the eight lymph nodes he removed. Four cycles of cisplatin and etoposide through September and October. I dropped from 170 pounds to 137. I lost my hair. I could not walk up a flight of stairs without sitting down halfway.
Before the chemo started, my father drove me to a clinic and made me bank sperm. I was sixteen. I told him I just wanted to survive the next month. He told me I might want kids someday. He was right. One of my children, born years later through IVF, came from the vials we stored that summer.
I survived. The chemotherapy cisplatin worked. I went back to school. I went back to baseball.
By senior year, I had gained some of the weight back. But the body that had been throwing in the low eighties was gone. The velocity was gone. The command was different. I went 4-4. The D1 scouts stopped coming. I went to one college for a semester and tried to walk on. I did not make the team. I transferred to another school for three semesters. Then a third for two. I never graduated from any of them. I kept rebuilding.
By twenty, I was at a junior college in Connecticut. Three years older than the typical freshman. My best friend had played there the year before, called the coach, and told him to give me a look. The coach took the call. He took me in. We spent two years rebuilding the body that cisplatin had taken apart. From 175 pounds to 200. From low-eighties to 86 miles an hour.
In 1998, we won the NJCAA Division III national championship. The first Connecticut team to win one. I was the staff ace. I went 9-0 my sophomore year on a 44-5 team. Eight wins on the way to the title. The ninth win is what I have been doing ever since.
I built a career. I got married. I have wonderful children and a great life.
I thought the cancer chapter was closed.
In 2025, more than thirty years after my original diagnosis, I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. I am also currently being followed for a small kidney tumor that may be malignant, but very curable if cancerous. The drug that saved me in my teens did its job. It also showed up again, decades later, in ways the original protocols did not predict. Cisplatin late effects are documented in the literature, and the AYA cohort is the one that lives long enough for them to matter.