The Diagnosis
Stage 1, but the game goes on
I always cringed when I heard the word cancer. It scared me to the point of making my mind think that it’s the end. I would always tell myself, I hope that in my life I never get cancer and have to deal with it.
Well, my most feared thought came true — I was diagnosed with Stage 1 Classic Seminoma.
My mind went blank, and I looked at my wife and said “Yes” after I hung up the phone with my doctor’s office. I’m not going into great detail about my diagnosis, but I just want to express that it’s important to get checked by a doctor when something doesn’t feel right. Before I knew it, I was being rolled on a gurney into the operating room. The hardest part for me in this journey, besides telling my wife, was my family, especially my parents. In life, there are phone calls that are hard to make, and that was the hardest.
Now back to baseball and the first inning in my new game.
Even though this is a baseball publication and I write about it on a freelance basis, I tried to forget about everything in life, especially baseball. The only thing on my mind was cancer, doctors, tests and the list goes on and on. My mind would wander into the unknown, and I would just not want to think about anything, especially baseball. As weird as life is, baseball was and is still there. I would be reminded of the game by the littlest things in life, from a person wearing a Yankees baseball cap in the doctor’s office to a used, waterlogged, dirty baseball sitting in the grass by my house. The list goes on. I gave in and said to myself, besides my family and friends to get me through this, baseball will too.
I got into baseball because, when I was a young teenager, my late grandmother put together a scrapbook of baseball articles and told me that “you can do this.” I read the articles with great interest, and the idea came into my mind of writing a story – my own story. Today I have my own scrapbook of at least five hundred authored articles, contributed to the book Baseball Stories for the Soul and had my own baseball podcast.
So, the innings of this story are about two things that I care about in life now: baseball and cancer. When I began to do research on cancer, I also realized that Major League Baseball is so involved with finding a cure for cancer. MLB and its teams have donated more than $50 million to Stand Up for Cancer, support cancer clinical trials, and host the annual Mother’s & Father’s Day Cancer Awareness games. Plus, they support so much more. So I felt I wasn’t alone from a baseball standpoint. That dark cloud, each day, became more sunny. The innings of life grew by the day.
In the last inning of this story, the scar I have is mine and only mine. This is my battle scar. The battle in the fight against cancer.
Until then, see you at the park.
— Joe Boesch