Jason Collins married his partner, Brunson Green, last May in a ceremony in Austin, Texas, “that couldn’t have been more perfect.” He enjoyed one of the most special moments of his life a couple of months before receiving the devastating news: one of the most lethal and aggressive cancers known, a stage 4 glioblastoma, lives in his brain. “Because my tumor is unresectable, when treated only with standard treatment (radiation and temozolomide), the average prognosis is between 11 and 14 months to live,” he now shares. He just turned 47 years old.
Already in September, Collins’ family sent a brief statement to explain that the former player had a brain tumor. “It was intentionally vague, and they did it to protect my privacy while I was mentally incapable of speaking for myself and we were trying to understand what we were dealing with,” he recalls in an interview with ESPN. The former player, a great tennis fan, realized that something was not right when he went to pack his suitcase to make his annual procession to the US Open. Friends and family wondered if perhaps he had suffered a stroke due to his erratic attitude. It only took five minutes of CT scan for the doctors to realize the extent of the matter and they sent him urgently to the oncology department.
“According to my family, in a matter of hours, my mental clarity, short-term memory, and comprehension skills disappeared. I became the NBA version of Dory in Finding Nemo“Collins recalls in his conversation with journalist Ramona Shelburne. Since the treatment started, he has lost almost 10 kilos of weight, and has had to seek help outside the United States. The former player’s tumor was expanding at a rate of 30%, when doctors consider that 20% is already critical growth. If he had decided to do nothing, the specialists gave him between six weeks and three months to live.
Former NBA player, Jason Collins, was diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma this summer. Jason and his husband, Brunson, traveled to Singapore to try an experimental treatment that will give him more time. was able to sit down with him as he talks about his…
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His fighting spirit made him explore new, still experimental therapies. The wallet, as he himself acknowledges, has not been a problem in obtaining them. Although they are not available to everyone. To continue his treatment, Collins has traveled to Singapore to receive a type of chemotherapy directed to the brain for the next two months. The goal is to keep most of your immune system intact and slow the tumor’s progress enough so that a type of immunotherapy still in development can be applied to you.
“In crossing this barrier,” says the former player, who draws parallels between his decision to make his homosexuality public and his current battle against one of the most lethal cancers. “We are not going to sit back and let cancer kill me without having fought. If what I am doing doesn’t save me, at least I will feel good if it can help someone who one day receives the same diagnosis,” he says.
Collins. He did not play a game again until February 2014, when the Brooklyn Nets signed him in free agency in the last year of his professional career. That same year, TIME magazine ranked him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. At 2.13 meters tall, the center played 13 seasons in the elite of American basketball for six different franchises, with averages of 3.6 points and 3.7 rebounds in 20 minutes of play in 735 appearances. His debut came after being selected 18th in the 2001 Draft, the same year in which Pau Gasol was chosen.
After making his sexuality public through an article in Sports Illustrated —“I am a 34-year-old center in the NBA. I am black. And I am gay,” he wrote—Collins was applauded by such notable figures as the then president of the United States, Barack Obama, who called him personally to thank him for his bravery. “I told him I couldn’t be more proud. Seeing a role model who is not afraid is something magnificent,” the president commented from the White House. The American league, through commissioner David Stern, also celebrated that its player assumed “leadership in such an important matter.” Professional colleagues like Kobe Bryant also said theirs: “Don’t suffocate who you are because of the ignorance of others.”
When Collins revealed his sexual orientation, same-sex marriage was not yet legalized nationwide in the United States. It was in June 2015 when the country’s Supreme Court overturned all the prohibitions still in force in some states, making the United States the seventeenth country in the world to legalize these unions.
