ESPN
Basketball legend Jason Collins has opened up about his Stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis.
Back in September, Collins’ family announced that the former NBA star, who made history as the league’s first openly gay player, was undergoing treatment for a brain tumour.
They added: “Jason and his family welcome your support and prayers and kindly ask for privacy as they dedicate their attention to Jason’s health and well-being.”
Over the last few months, Collins has kept additional details about his treatment and diagnosis private.
However, on 11 December, the 47-year-old talent peeled back the curtain on his journey in a new heartfelt essay shared on ESPN.
“A few months ago, my family released a short statement saying I had a brain tumour. It was simple, but intentionally vague,” he wrote.
“They did that to protect my privacy while I was mentally unable to speak for myself, and my loved ones were trying to understand what we were dealing with. But now it’s time for people to hear directly from me.”
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Collins then revealed that he was diagnosed with “one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer,” Stage 4 glioblastoma, adding that it came on “incredibly fast.”
The former Brooklyn Nets player explained that he first noticed something was “really wrong” in August, two months after he got married to his husband, film producer Brunson Green.
“We were supposed to go to the US Open, just as every year, but when the car came to take us to the airport, I was nowhere near ready,” he continued.
“And for the first time in decades, we missed the flight because I couldn’t stay focused to pack. I had been having weird symptoms like this for a week or two, but unless something is really wrong, I’m going to push through. I’m an athlete.”
Due to his symptoms, Collins said that he had a CT done at UCLA, but it only lasted five minutes.
“The tech pulled me out and said they were going to have me see a specialist. I’ve had enough CTs in my life to know they last longer than five minutes, and whatever the tech had seen on the first images had to be bad,” he wrote.
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Following the scan, the trailblazing athlete said that his “mental clarity, short-term memory and comprehension” disappeared within hours, adding that he turned into the “NBA player’s version of Dory from Finding Nemo.”
“What makes glioblastoma so dangerous is that it grows within a very finite, contained space – the skull – and it’s very aggressive and can expand,” he explained.
“What makes it so difficult to treat in my case is that it’s surrounded by the brain and is encroaching upon the frontal lobe – which is what makes you, you. My glioblastoma is ‘multiforme.’ Imagine a monster with tentacles spreading across the underside of my brain, the width of a baseball.”
Collins discovered just how severe his glioblastoma diagnosis was after a biopsy, which revealed that it had a growth factor of 30%.
“Meaning that within a matter of weeks, if nothing were to be done, the tumour would run out of room and I’d probably be dead within six weeks to three months,” he said.
“My glio is extraordinary for all the wrong reasons, and is ‘wild type’ it has all these mutations that make it even more deadly and difficult to treat. What’s that mythical creature where you cut off one head, but it learns to grow two more? The Hydra. That’s the kind of glio I have.”
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Fortunately, Collins isn’t showing any signs of giving up, writing that he has been hard at work researching all of his options and receiving different forms of treatment, which included taking the drug Avastin and undergoing radiation treatments.
“We aren’t going to sit back and let this cancer kill me without giving it a hell of a fight. We’re going to try to hit it first, in ways it’s never been hit: with radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy that’s still being studied but offers the most promising frontier of cancer treatment for this type of cancer,” he wrote.
“Currently, I’m receiving treatment at a clinic in Singapore that offers targeted chemotherapy – using EDVs – a delivery mechanism that acts as a Trojan horse, seeking out proteins only found in glioblastomas to deliver its toxic payload past the blood-brain barrier and straight into my tumours.
“The goal is to keep fighting the progress of the tumours long enough for a personalised immunotherapy to be made for me, and to keep me healthy enough to receive that immunotherapy once it’s ready.”
Collins came out in 2013 on the cover of Sports Illustrated, becoming the first active male athlete from one of the four major North American professional sports leagues to do so.
At the time, he said: “I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation.”
Read Collins’ full essay here and watch his full interview with ESPN below.
