By Jeffrey Reinhart
Published Nov 04, 2005 12:36
But it was a basketball practice Elizabethtown senior Cole Barnes will never forget.
It was the winter of 2002, and Barnes was in eighth grade.
“Typical middle-school boy,” he said. “Running around and being an idiot ... doing crazy things.”
Then Barnes’ classmate, A.J. Shippling, made a crazy discovery.
“He saw a lump on my neck,” Barnes said. “It didn’t seem that serious to me at the time. I didn’t think anything was going to happen to me.”
Barnes showed the lump to his parents, Don and Tana, who took Cole to Lancaster General Hospital.
The diagnosis?
Barnes had a tumor lodged between his right collarbone and his carotid artery.
“About the size of a ping-pong ball,” he said. “When they removed the tumor, they told me it was pretty bad and that it was malignant. When my oncologist told me it was cancer, my mom and dad broke down.
“I understood that I had cancer, but I also knew that I could battle through it.”
“It” was a cancerous Primitive Neuroectodermal (P-NET) tumor &tstr; a soft tissue sarcoma that mostly affects children and young adults.
Seventy-five percent of patients diagnosed with a P-NET tumor are under 35 years of age.
Barnes turned 18 on Oct. 10.
He is the second-leading rusher on E-town’s football team, which is 5-4 overall heading into Friday night’s season finale at home against Lebanon.
That Cole Barnes is even back playing football is a miracle.
“I consider myself pretty lucky to have survived that,” he said. “But I’d also consider myself pretty unlucky because I missed a lot of things.”
That is because Barnes spent 11 excruciating months receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Hershey Medical Center.
“The treatment was brutal,” he said.
Barnes was at Hershey Med for five days of treatments, then he went home for three weeks, then he went back for three days of treatments, then he went back home for three weeks.
He repeated that sequence 12 more times and he willed himself through each and every one.
“I’d get home and be sick for a week,” Barnes said. “Then I’d go to school for a week, then I’d go back to the hospital the next week.”
He tried to play basketball and baseball, but he was too weak.
He even lost his hair.
“Then everyone on the basketball team shaved their heads,” Barnes said. “Probably 50 of my friends shaved their heads. It showed me the love my teammates and my friends have for each other.”
Many of Barnes’ friends often came to Hershey Med to sit with him while he received his chemo treatments.
“When I was diagnosed, I got so many questions about it,” Barnes said. “Not many of my friends understood it. When they heard the word cancer, they thought I didn’t have much time left to live.”
It turns out that if Shippling wouldn’t have discovered the lump that fateful day at basketball practice, things might have turned out differently.
“The tumor was only about four-to-six weeks old,” Barnes said. “If I would have waited a little longer to find it, my doctors told me I probably would have had about six months to live.
“That’s how aggressive this cancer is. That’s scary. I’m really lucky. And I thank A.J. especially for finding it.”
Shippling, a senior fullback, is E-town’s leading rusher this season.
Barnes, who missed his entire 10th-grade football season after breaking his left leg, has not received a chemotherapy treatment in more than two years.
He still gets checked out at Hershey Med every four months. And he’s been back twice to talk to young cancer patients about how he beat P-NET.
“It has been in remission for more than two years,” Barnes said. “They said that if I could make it through two years, the chances of it coming back were very low.
“So I’m cancer-free now.”
Cancer-free and breaking away from defenders from his halfback spot.
Cancer-free and playing Junior Olympic volleyball this winter.
Cancer-free and looking forward to attending West Virginia University to study sports management &tstr; and hopefully earning a tryout for the football team.
Cancer-free and being a teenager. A son. A brother. A student. A classmate. A teammate.
“Some kids just crank it up on the day of the game,” E-town football coach Jeff Polites said. “Cole cranks it up every day.
“It’s been a great experience just having him in our football program. He is truly an outstanding person.”
And inspiration to everyone he comes in contact with &tstr; especially the little kids at Hershey Med.
“This has made me work hard ... knowing I almost didn’t get the opportunity to be here,” Barnes said. “I don’t take much for granted. Everything that happens to me, I’m thankful for it.
“Every time I step on the football field or every time something good happens to me, it’s special, because I know I might not have been here.”
Thanks to Shippling’s discovery &tstr; and his own sheer will to beat cancer &tstr; Cole Barnes is here.
And he’s loving every second of it.
(Jeffrey Reinhart is a New Era sports writer. To reach him, e-mail jreinhart@lnpnews.com)
