For more than a year, “Mr. Ballsy” Thomas Cantley featured cancer survivors as part of his campaign of cancer prevention awareness, using #IamBallsy as the hashtag to unite cancer patients and survivors as he spread his positive message.
Here is one of those stories.
Dear Mr. Ballsy,
Most people are scared to tell anyone if they find a lump or something wrong with their body because they don’t want to be embarrassed on how they found out.
In reality it should be the other way around. It’s YOUR body if you don’t take care of it, then no one will.
My name is Dalton Collins but everyone calls me DJ. I just recently turned 20 years old and my whole life started coming together. On August 1st I asked my girlfriend (Ashley) to marry me, got the best job I could ask for working at the plants in La Port Texas as a rigger’s helper, making great money for any 20 or 30-year-old. I just moved Ashley into our own place closer to my job, we started trying to make a family of our own, and life was looking up.
To give you the Cliff’s Notes versions I had the worst pain imaginable—doctors had no idea what was wrong with me. They kept telling me that it must be some sort of work stress on your body. I had a growth on my neck and I couldn’t take it anymore.
Finally I got another opinion On October 7th, when I walked into that ER—this is when my life changed forever. They saw the lump in my neck and were shocked! After throwing up a few times—and with a lot of pain medicine prescribed—they took me back to take a CT and an ultrasound. I sat there waiting in the hospital room with Ashley and some of my family members. I can’t tell you how long we waited in that white room to hear the results of the test.
It seemed like a lifetime before they came in and told us that our nightmare had come true.
I had cancer at the age of only 20 years old when my life just started to come together. A few hours after finding out I had cancer they took me by ambulance to the hospital in Lufkin, Texas to do more tests and get me some help I so needed. The first night it was just Ashley and me who stayed at the hospital. The next day they ran more test and used words I have never heard of and it was all happening so fast I didn’t know what to do.
They ended up telling me I had stage four Testicular Cancer and it was in my neck, wrapped around my heart and my main blood vessel, in my lower stomach, and in my right testicle.
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Later that day I was put into surgery to take out my right testicle and put a stent in because the cancer cells where so large it was blocking some of my bladder and was making it hard for me to pee.
Surgery went fine and I was back in my room with some of my family and I waited for any type of news not knowing what to expect because I never heard any details of testicular cancer before so I was blindsided to all this. The next day my mother arrived and it was confirmed it was testicular cancer and we had to make a choice to wait on the chemotherapy and go to a sperm bank so I could have kids later in life or go ahead and start the chemo.
At 1st it was no brainer because Ashley and I had already been trying to have a baby for about six months now and it was her dream to be a mother and mine to have a large family until they added that the cancer was so bad and spread out over my body if I would have waited three weeks there was nothing at all they could have done for me.
After talking it over with Ashley, we decided we didn’t want to take the chance of us waiting even though it put a stop to our dreams of having our own kids and starting our family. The next day we started my first round of chemotherapy and again I had no clue what to expect. In three days I was told I had cancer, I lost my testicle (whichs made me feel like half a man), and I lost my dream of having not only a big family but any kids at all.
They gave me a pain medicine called Dilaudid which didn’t take away the pain but numbed it enough so I could bare it. I was doing well with my first round of chemotherapy and was in good spirits. It had not yet set in that I have cancer and I’m fighting for my life. Ashley slept with me while my mom slept on the couch for the next five days as I was getting this poison pumped inside of me. I couldn’t go to work since I got diagnosed with cancer so I lost the job I worked so hard for and was put in so much pain to keep. I couldn’t pay for our place to live so Ashley had to drive all the way down to Baytown and pack up everything we own and move it into my grandmother’s where we had to stay.
I got to go home on a Sunday but had to be back that Tuesday for more chemo then the Tuesday after that I had to come back and do another bag of chemo. The next day I saw my oncologist and she told me that I was going to start my week of chemotherapy the next day.
This time the chemotherapy was a little harsher and I was still steadily throwing up even with all the different nausea medicine I was on, and this was about the time my hair started falling out. I was rubbing my head and I just pulled out a glob of my hair. I did it again to see if I could and then showed Ashley. She freaked out and told me to quit so I did it more. I shaved my head a day or two later but I still left some on my head.
The next night I took a shower and I looked down to see nothing but black. I banged on the wall for Ashley to come look and when she opened the door to the bathroom all she could say is, “OH MY GOD!” and I knew all my hair was gone.
I saw my dead grandmother standing in front of me while I cried. She told me that only one or two things can happen and that is that you beat it, or let it beat you. That scared me and everyone else to death because she had been passed away for years now.
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After I was accepted to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas my doctor was shocked and couldn’t believe I’ve already had two out of four rounds of chemotherapy because my numbers were still in the 1,600 and they were supposed to be under five or one.
I was admitted that day and once again I was admitted into the hospital and had five days of chemo just as before.
My pain still had not become any better and I started throwing up even more which I didn’t think was possible. I was miserable.
I had started this whole ride at the weight of 180 and now there I was at the weight of 130, which was smaller than what I was in high school. Ashley stayed with me through this whole thing, never leaving my side. This was the week of Thanksgiving and instead of spending time with all my friends and family eating until I was about to explode, I had to spend it in the hospital. I got up one day to walk around the hospital while my mother, dad, his wife, and Ashley were here with me. I tried my best but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do a simple task like walk without being so weak. That’s when it first started to sink in that this was really happening, that I really did have cancer and I really am going through chemotherapy.
When I got back to the room I fell on the bed and all I could do was cry—the first time I truly cried in front of anyone. The next Tuesday I was put right back in for my fourth and last chemotherapy (so I thought). The doctor said the numbers were still not where they should be and he was starting to get even more worried—he said if the markers of the spreading cancer cells did not go down then the surgeons would not touch me.
At this point I still had the cancer in my neck which was as big as a baseball, still wrapped around my heart and main blood vessel, and still had the cancer in my lower stomach (and the one in my stomach was so large it was pushing all my organs out of place and that was what was causing most of the pain). NONE of the cancer had gone down, it was ALL Teratoma cancer which can only be removed by surgery. This made me lose even more hope. He said this is so difficult to treat because it was caught so late and had grown so much throughout the body.
I did my treatments and couldn’t get out there fast enough. I was tired of being in hospitals, tired of the pain, tired of everything. I just wanted to go home and lay in my own bed and just relax. Like before, I was used to the drill of driving back and forth every Tuesday to get more of the chemo.
One of the Tuesdays fell on Christmas Eve which I was so grateful I didn’t have to spend Christmas in there —the whole family was over for Christmas a day early and I ended up in the bathroom over half the day, however. Everyone else was eating and laughing and playing White Elephant (Chinese Christmas) and I couldn’t enjoy it. Christmas came along and it was worse than the day before because I couldn’t even get out of bed at all. So I ended up missing Christmas with my family, and the Chemo took everything I had to offer and some.
The next time I saw my oncologist we were expecting great news since that was my fourth round which is the last round for most people.
I did my scans, blood work, was in a GREAT mood, and eating which I wasn’t hardly doing anymore and just happy until I saw his face when he walked in. He sat down with us, showed us my scans, and that’s when—again—my whole world collapsed right in front of me.
The last bit of hope I had was gone during this visit.
The cancer was all still there and none of it seemed to disappeared. It was still as I said before, in my neck as big as a baseball, wrapped around my heart and main blood vessesl, and so big in my lower stomach it was still pushing all my organs.
He told me he put together the best surgeons in this hospital (and maybe in the world) but he is not sure if surgery can be done because of how big of the mass the cancer is.
He said I might loose some of my organs and it will be a miracle if I survived.
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UPDATE: Three years later, DJ is still alive and fighting his personal battle with recovery after being cancer-free.
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Photo: Getty Images
This essay originally appeared on Mr. Ballsy’s #IamBallsy stories page.
Read Thomas Cantley/Mr. Ballsy #IamBallsy Stories every week here on The Good Men Project!