Living in southern CT where Red Sox and Yankee fans live next to each other, and Patriots and Jets/Giants fans encounter each other daily there are few ways to avoid the rivalry. From a young age I remember my uncle saying something along the lines of “You can be any baseball fan you’d like, just you can’t be a Yankees fan.” There was never any real question of where my loyalties would lie but that sentiment pretty well encapsulates where my sports allegiances stem from. So while my Patriots allegiance was never in jeopardy this post describes why there is absolutely no chance I will ever root a team over the Patriots.
Sometime during treatment my Uncle Ed, huge sports fan, mentioned he’d read an article a few months prior that one of the former Patriots, Joe Andruzzi, member of ’01, ’03 and ’04 Super Bowl Teams, had lymphoma maybe even the same kind. A few Google searches later I found the best Sports Illustrated article ever! Joe Andruzzi, was diagnosed in 2007 with Burkitt’s Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Same type as mine, though different location, his was abdomen rather than neck in my case.
Now I am not even coming close to doing the article justice I can’t hope to sum up the enormous complexity of the emotions conveyed in the article about a young boy who passed away years before Andruzzi was diagnosed, his brother’s involvement in 9/11 as FDNY who were in the Towers, you should defiantly read the full article. But some key points I wanted to highlight relative to the experience of Burkitt’s:
“Ultimately he was determined to have Burkitt’s Lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that advances with such haste that it can double in size in just 24 hours.”
“There was much work left for Joe. It is the paradox of Burkitt’s Lymphoma that while it is ruthlessly aggressive, it also responds well to equally aggressive chemotherapy. That phrase — “aggressive chemotherapy’‘ — is so antiseptic as to be misleading. Joe Andruzzi tosses off admissions of pain like manhole covers, yet he says, “It was real tough.’”
“He spent nearly the entire summer as an inpatient at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The chemo took his hair, his weight (he lost more than 40 pounds) and his energy. He was known as one of the toughest people in the Patriots’ locker room, making the NFL as an undrafted free agent from Division II Southern Connecticut State and enduring multiple surgeries in addition to the relentless physical work performed by offensive linemen. Yet now he says, “I went to 10 training camps in the NFL. I’d rather go to any training camp than what I went through last summer.” - Tim Layden, SI.com 1/31/2008
Andruzzi’s story meant a lot to me. Reading it during treatment to see that someone as strong as him felt beat down made me feel a lot better about barely moving from my couch. Though I’d be surprised if he played as much as xbox as I did that summer…
Reading how his cancer had presented in his abdomen was another key kernel of knowledge for me, it once again reinforced how lucky I was that my tumor was on my neck. A place that visually showed far before any physical symptoms occurred, with a tumor the size of a golf ball on my neck and otherwise asymptomatic and already stage II I can’t even imagine when I would have been diagnosed if the cancer had presented in my abdomen or some other location and then how much worse my survival changes would have been or how much harder/longer treatment would have been…
So in 2009 when I rode my first Pan Mass Challenge and I learned Joe Andruzzi was to be riding and at the Opening Ceremonies in Sturbridge I was understandably excited. Listening to him speak was pretty awesome and echoed a lot of what the SI article talked about. When the ceremony was finishing up I wandered to the front of the seating area in hopes of maybe talking to Andruzzi. I was able to get his attention (I think my Dad my have been the one who made initial contact but that’s not the point). I told him I also had Burkitt’s and we ended up talking for 5-10 minutes about treatment and swapping stories. the coolest part was when some other fans came up and asked for his autograph, he was very gracious and gave it to them, but still maintained eye contact with me and kept engaging about our shared cancer. It was the first time that I can vividly remember the power of cancer connections being so instantly connecting complete strangers.
