Former Brooklyn Nets forward Jason Collins, the first openly gay player in the NBA, is battling stage four brain cancer, he announced on Thursday.
Collins, 47, has a particularly aggressive form of glioblastoma, he wrote in an article published by ESPN.
“I was in the 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 wrote. “I’ve had 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.”
In September, Collins’ family announced he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor, but he said Thursday that statement was intentionally vague and allowed him to gather his thoughts and explain his whole story.
Glioblastoma is the most common form of brain cancer in adults, according to the American Cancer Society. The cancer spreads quickly around the brain or spinal cord, endangering crucial parts of the central nervous system.
“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,” Collins wrote. “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.’”
Collins said he and his family first realized something was wrong in August, when he missed a flight due to brain fog and scattered thoughts. He began receiving treatment shortly afterward, even flying to Singapore to receive targeted chemotherapy.
On average, someone with Collins’ cancer will live for an additional 11 to 14 months, he wrote.
“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,” he wrote. “So if what I’m doing doesn’t save me, I feel good thinking that it might help someone else who gets a diagnosis like this one day.”