\n<\/p>\n
Jason Collins, the former NBA player who became the first openly gay man to play in a major US pro sports league, said Thursday he\u2019s battling \u201cone of the deadliest forms of brain cancer\u201d.<\/p>\n
Collins, who revealed in a brief statement in September that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor, said in an interview with ESPN\u2019s Ramona Shelburne published Thursday that he has stage 4 glioblastoma.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt came on incredibly fast,\u201d the 47-year-old said, describing early symptoms of memory loss and inability to focus that reached a tipping point in August.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had been having weird symptoms like this for a week or two, but unless something is really wrong, I\u2019m going to push through. I\u2019m an athlete,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n
But he said a CT scan revealed the extent and seriousness of his illness, which he said was a \u201cmultiforme\u201d glioblastoma that was growing so quickly that he could die within weeks.<\/p>\n
He said that with the support of his husband, Brunson Green, and other friends and family he began treatment with medication followed by radiation and chemotherapy.<\/p>\n
He said his decision to pursue innovative treatment \u2013 currently at a clinic in Singapore \u2013 reminded him of when he decided to come out as gay.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like I\u2019m right back in that position now, where I might be the first person through this wall,\u201d he said. \u201cWe aren\u2019t going to sit back and let this cancer kill me without giving it a hell of a fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to try to hit it first, in ways it\u2019s never been hit: with radiation and chemotherapy and immunotherapy that\u2019s still being studied but offers the most promising frontier of cancer treatment for this type of cancer.<\/p>\n
Collins recalled that when his grandmother was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer, she didn\u2019t like to hear people use the word \u201ccancer\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t care if you say the word,\u201d he said. \u201cI have cancer, but just like my grandmother fought it, I\u2019m going to fight it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jason Collins, the former NBA player who became the first openly gay man to play in a major US pro sports league, said Thursday he\u2019s battling \u201cone of the deadliest forms of brain cancer\u201d. Collins, who revealed in a brief statement in September that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor, said in an<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[1188,2121,11263,1822,825,6986,132,1621,12866,3461,20538,1569],"class_list":{"0":"post-36960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-brain","10":"tag-collins","11":"tag-diagnosis","12":"tag-gay","13":"tag-jason","14":"tag-live","15":"tag-nbas","16":"tag-openly","17":"tag-player","18":"tag-tumor","19":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}