Collins penned an emotional essay revealing his prognosis and the reaction of his family and friends
Jason Collins attends the Point Foundation hosts Annual Point Honors New York Gala Celebrating The Accomplishments Of LGBTQ Students at The Plaza Hotel on April 9, 2018
Jason Collins.
Former NBA player Jason Collins penned an emotional essay for ESPN about his Stage 4 brain cancer
Collins compared his glioblastoma to "a monster with tentacles spreading across the underside of my brain the width of a baseball" in the essay
Collins said after he was given a prognosis of just 11-14 months, his twin brother Jarron told him, "You have to fight. No matter what, you have to fight"
Former NBA player Jason Collins, the first openly gay athlete in the league, revealed that he has Stage 4 brain cancer.
Collins, 46, first shared that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor in a statement from his family in September. Exactly three months later, on Thursday, Dec. 11, the former basketball player penned an emotional essay for ESPN in which he revealed the full details about his diagnosis and said he plans to keeping "fighting" for his health.
Collins said his family's initial statement was "simple, but intentionally vague" in an effort 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," he continued. Collins revealed that he has "Stage 4 glioblastoma, one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer" and that it "came on incredibly fast."
Jason Collins of the Brooklyn Nets during a game against the Toronto Raptors on March 10, 2014
Jason Collins of the Brooklyn Nets during a game against the Toronto Raptors on March 10, 2014
Collins told readers about his marriage to "the love of my life" Brunson Greene in May, in a ceremony "that couldn't have been more perfect," he wrote. But Collins said when it came time for them to leave for the airport for their trip to the US Open at the end of the summer, "I couldn't stay focused to pack," he said, calling that one of the "weird symptoms" he had been experiencing in the week leading up to their trip.
"But unless something is really wrong, I'm going to push through, I'm an athlete," Collins said, before writing, "Something was really wrong, though."
He recalled being in a CT machine at UCLA "for all of five minutes before the tech pulled me out and said they were going to have me see a specialist." Collins said he had undergone "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."
Collins said his family told him his "mental clarity, short-term memory and comprehension disappeared" in just "hours," and over the next weeks, "we would find out just how bad it was."
Jason CollinsJason Collins
Jason Collins at the Paley Festival.
The former Nets player explained that what makes his condition, glioblastoma, "so dangerous is that it grows within a very finite, contained space — the skull — and it's very aggressive and can expand," in the ESPN essay. "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,' " he continued.
Collins compared his glioblastoma to "a monster with tentacles spreading across the underside of my brain the width of a baseball."
"The biopsy revealed that my glio had a growth factor of 30%, meaning that within a matter of weeks, if nothing were to be done, the tumor would run out of room and I'd probably be dead within six weeks to three months," he wrote.
Collins went on in his essay to share that he's always "prided" himself on "having the right people" around him, noting that when he "came out publicly as the first active gay basketball player in 2013," that he "wasn't worried it would leak before the story came out, because I trusted the people I told."
He said that now, he can "honestly say" that life is "so much better when you just show up as your true self, unafraid to be your true self, in public or private."
Collins told readers he and his loved ones "aren't going to sit back and let this cancer kill me without giving it a hell of a fight," in the essay, and said the "goal is to keep fighting the progress of the tumors long enough for a personalized immunotherapy to be made for me, and to keep me healthy enough to receive that immunotherapy once it's ready."
Collins also revealed that his prognosis is "only 11 to 14 months" and said, "If that's all the time I have left, I'd rather spend it trying a course of treatment that might one day be a new standard of care for everyone."
Collins shared that he had a conversation with his twin brother, Jarron, after the prognosis, and that his twin said, "'You have to fight. No matter what, you have to fight."
He also recalled a comment someone made to him after he came out in 2013, telling him his "choice to live openly could help someone who I might never meet." Collins said he's "held onto that for years" and if he "can do that again now, then that matters."