Former NBA player Jason Collins reveals Stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis
The news comes after Collins' family first announced that he had a brain tumor in September.
by Gina Vivinetto | TODAY · 5 NBCDFWJason Collins has been diagnosed with Stage 4 glioblastoma.
The former basketball pro, who made headlines in 2013 when he became the first active NBA player to come out as gay, announced his diagnosis Dec. 11 on the ESPN website.
“A few months ago, my family released a short statement saying I had a brain tumor. It was simple, but intentionally vague. 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,” Collins told the sports outlet.
“But now it’s time for people to hear directly from me. I have Stage 4 glioblastoma, one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer. It came on incredibly fast,” he continued.
Collins said he went public with his diagnosis for the same reasons he came out as gay in 2013. “Your life is so much better when you just show up as your true self, unafraid to be your true self, in public or private. This is me. This is what I’m dealing with,” he said.
Read on to learn what Collins said about his Stage 4 glioblastoma diagnosis.
What is glioblastoma?
Glioblastoma is an aggressive form of cancer that begins in the brain or spinal cord and has no cure, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Collins told ESPN that his form of “glio” is particularly aggressive.
“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 said. “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,” he said.
A biopsy revealed that the cancer in Collins’ brain factor “had a growth factor of 30%,” which, he explained, meant 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.”
Collins went on to explain that his brain cancer was the “wild type” that contained “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,” he said.
What were Jason Collins' first symptoms?
Early symptoms of glioblastoma may include headaches, confusion, memory loss, personality changes, speech difficulties and vision changes, among other signs.
Collins said he and his husband, Brunson Green, first noticed something was off when they were forced to skip their annual flight to see the US Open because Collins “couldn’t stay focused” enough to pack his bags.
Collins said he has been having “weird symptoms” for a week or two but thought “unless something is really wrong, I’m going to push through” because, he reasoned, he was “an athlete.”
After the incident with the missed flight, Collins went to UCLA to undergo a CT scan but after just five minutes in the machine, a tech “pulled” him out and said they were going to arrange for him to see a specialist. Collins, who said he’s undergone multiple CT scans in his life, knew it was a “bad” sign.
“According to my family, in hours, my mental clarity, short-term memory and comprehension disappeared — turning into an NBA player’s version of ‘Dory’ from ‘Finding Nemo.’ Over the next few weeks we would find out just how bad it was,” he told ESPN.
When his loved ones learned of his diagnosis, Collins was in the hospital behaving strangely with his mind in a “fog,” they later told him.
“Brunson said I lost the desire to watch tennis while I was in the hospital, unable to move, and took a liking to calm, quiet Korean soap operas — in Korean,” he shared.
Brunson also took away Collins’ phone after discovering he was sending “very weird text messages” and “watching mindless TikToks for hours.”
What is Collins' treatment plan?
Though there is no cure for glioblastoma, treatments might slow cancer growth and reduce symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Collins told ESPN after leaving the hospital, he began taking a drug called Avastin, which he called “my best chance of stopping the growth of the tumor and regaining any quality of life back.”
He has also received radiation treatments, which helped improve some symptoms.
“Within days, I started coming out of my fog,” he said. “They had to wheel me into my first radiation treatment. By the third one I could walk.”
By the middle of October, he said, he could take short walks around his neighborhood. “My husband even gave me back my phone,” he said.
Collins said he’s currently 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 tumors.”
The goal, he said, “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 said his plan is to continue to “hit” his cancer “in ways it’s never been hit: with radiation and chemotherapy and immunotherapy that’s still being studied but offers the most promising frontier of cancer treatment for this type of cancer.”
He said he was “fortunate” to be in a financial position to “go wherever in the world I need to go to get treatment.
“So if what I’m doing doesn’t save me,” he said. “I feel good thinking that it might help someone else who gets a diagnosis like this one day.”
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