PITTSBURGH — The artifacts of cancer are different to each patient, and to each survivor. To some, it’s head scarves and blankets. To others, it’s tears and frustration.
To Pittsburgh running back James Conner, it’s his scars. The visible ones, sure, but the intangible ones, too. The ones only he can feel. Like the early December day he considers his lowest of lows — when he had to stand in front of his teammates and tell them through tears that he had cancer.
This week, Conner tugged at the collar of his T-shirt, exposing a thick, horizontal scar on his neck.
“I didn’t like this one at first,” he says, “but now, I’m proud of it.”
Scars and ink cover Conner's body, telling his story almost better than he can. He starts with this scar — the one on his neck — despite the fact it reminds him of his biopsy last fall, and the cancer diagnosis that changed his life. Because of that, he starts there.
On Thanksgiving, doctors had told Conner, who was the reigning ACC Player of the Year, he had cancer. They just didn’t know what type and what stage.
Conner's mother prayed there would be some clerical error or someone had misread a scan. But on the first day of December, Conner learned his diagnosis: Hodgkin lymphoma, stage 2, meaning the cancer had likely started in his neck and spread to his chest.
“The world was in slow-mo, and my mom started crying,” Conner says. “I tried to be strong.”
Says Conner’s mother, Kelly Patterson: “He was trying to be so strong for me, and I was trying to be so strong for him that it worked out. It broke my heart to think that he's in his apartment by himself bawling, because he's so scared or something. He told me he wasn't, but I'm thinking how could you not be?”
Patterson made her son promise that he wouldn’t pretend he was fine if he wasn’t, that he’d tell her if he was down, that they’d go through this together. And they did — through what Conner called his worst day, on Dec. 4 when he cried as he told his teammates the news, through the decision to go public with his battle, through the 12 chemotherapy appointments that spanned six months.
“We haven't had the worst life, we haven't had the best life,” Patterson says. “My mom calls me ‘The Fixer,’ like Olivia Pope from 'Scandal', because I'm always like, ‘Everything's going to be fine. It will be fine. We'll fix it. It's going to be OK. What can we do?’ As long as we're healthy, we're good.
“Then, when he's not healthy … It does mess you up a little bit, but we knew he was going to be OK. We knew it. He had to be. There wasn't any other option. Eighty-five percent (chance of survival) — it could have been even less than that, we would have figured something out.”
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” — Jeremiah 29:11
These words run across Conner’s right shin, starting right below the scar that marks the inside of his knee. It’s there on purpose, next to the permanent reminder of his torn MCL, an injury that devastated Conner almost a year ago but would pale in comparison to what was to follow.
He’d taken a handoff and spun out of a tackle on Sept. 5 in the first half of Pitt’s season opener against Youngstown State. He knew something was wrong, but he got up and jogged off the field. He was held out the rest of the game as a precaution but figured he’d be back the following week. His thinking changed the next morning after an MRI exam.
“When it came back and you could see it off the bone, I just started crying like a little baby, because I had worked so hard,” Conner says. “I wanted to enter the draft that year.”
He’d never been in better shape, he says, coming off a season in which he rushed for 1,765 yards and 26 touchdowns, and was poised for even more success.
Days later, he underwent knee surgery. Weeks passed on crutches, hours slipping away on the couch watching Netflix with his roommate, Rachid Ibrahim, who was also sidelined for the season with a torn Achilles tendon suffered during preseason camp. “You don’t want to know how many times we watched Remember the Titans,” Ibrahim jokes. “Ten to fifteen times.”
By late October and early November, Conner’s knee rehab was going quite well. He was running and lifting weights, even entertaining a potential return before season’s end.
“But while I'm lifting I can see that I'm getting out of breath really fast,” Conner says. “I'm straining my face. I swell up and get puffy, swollen. I have dizziness a lot.”
Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi noticed it, too, wondering what had happened to his star running back. Was he drinking too much alcohol? Was he sleeping enough?
“I just thought he wasn't taking care of his body because he wasn't playing,” Narduzzi says. “He kept looking the same. One day we're on the field, probably a week or two before he found there was a tumor in his chest, I went over to the doctor on the sidelines I said, ‘Doc, something’s wrong. What is going on? We need to investigate this.’ ”
Conner had tried different antibiotics. Doctors thought perhaps it was a sinus infection. That is, until the antibiotics had no effect. For weeks, no one could figure it out.
Finally, Conner visited an ear, nose and throat specialist, who ruled out any issues with Conner's sinuses and then ordered an X-ray on his chest, which eventually led to a positron emissions tomography (PET) scan — and the discovery of a large tumor.
Conner believes the knee injury saved his life.
“You've got two veins; one carries blood directly to the body, one carries blood to the heart," Conner says. "That tumor was growing and was pressing on that vein. That vein was getting skinnier and skinnier.
“If I never had this knee injury I would've been on the field and I probably would've been feeling out of shape and that I’ve got to work even harder. I’d be taking shots to the chest. I could've died on the field. I’m very thankful for my knee injury — I know He did that to save my life. ... He didn't want to harm me when he did my knee injury. He did it to save me."
Conner’s scar just below his collarbone matches that of many cancer survivors. It’s the one from his port, the way his body received whichever chemo cocktail he needed during his treatments.
Patterson sat by his side through each of those 12 chemo treatments. They’d take place every two weeks, and she’d drive two hours each way from Erie to hold her son’s hand.
James is the baby of the family, the youngest of Patterson’s four sons. She’d had his brothers when she was just a teen-ager, and James a few years later. Hoping for a girl, she cried when he was born; his brothers still tease him and tell him he’s adopted. “I’d say, ‘No, silly. If Mommy was going to adopt a baby I would have adopted a girl, so don't worry about it,’ ” she says, laughing. Even now that he’s 21 years old, he’s still her baby.
And she wished more than anything she could take away his pain — which was getting worse as the treatments wore on. In the beginning, he’d spend the three or four hours in a common area, so he could meet and talk with other cancer patients. By the fifth and sixth treatment, Conner had grown too nauseous.
“He had the dry heaves,” Patterson says. “He turned this purple color. He's sweating, and he had goosebumps at the same time. He had this little green bag. He's like, ‘Chill out, mom.’ It's like, I can't. I don't know what to do. How can I fix this?”
Some of the nausea was anticipatory, caused by anxiety leading up to treatment. He’d take medication for that, which helped, but it didn’t always work. Conner’s hair grew thinner as the chemo progressed, but he never lost all of it.
“Sometimes, he’d come home from chemo and just be defeated,” Ibrahim says. “He'd lay down, we'd watch TV, he'd be asleep until maybe six, seven at night. Then he’d wake up and he’d start feeling a lot better. He always made an emphasis the next day to really go break a sweat. He said the doctor said that'd be a good thing.”
Teammates were in awe as they watched Conner sprint on the treadmill, surgical mask on his face to guard against germs. Narduzzi couldn’t believe Conner’s bursts of speed during non-contact parts of spring practice. Even Conner’s doctor, Stanley Marks, called Conner’s physical exertion between chemo treatments “extreme” in a wonderful way. Kansas City Chiefs safety Eric Berry, who beat the same type of cancer, had told Conner “not to be a coach potato.” He took the advice seriously.
Anything that could help him attack and defeat cancer, he wanted to try. He wanted to document it, too, to apprise football fans and raise cancer awareness.
Marks has treated his fair share of well-known figures, from professional athletes to politicians. He can’t recall a single patient waging such a public war on his own cancer the way Conner did. Conner has plans of continuing his involvement in lymphoma research and awareness, particularly for child patients, after he leaves Pitt.
“He clearly made it a mission, if you will,” Marks says. “He was confident he was going to get better, but he really had this urge to help the other patients. I was amazed. He was only 20 years old (for much of the treatment). His level of maturity just truly was remarkable. He was just so caring about the other patients.
“It wasn't fake. It wasn't just to make and do it for media hype, but he really did care about the other patients and would just go around and talk to them, asking where they were from, when they were done with their treatments.
“When he was in the treatment area, there was like this buzz. Everyone was upbeat. I think it really helped patients get through some of their darkest times.”
Earlier this month, Conner was named the first recipient of the James Conner Courage Award, given to him by Marks at a fundraising dinner for cancer research. Conner prepared a speech but scrapped most of it, too overcome by emotion to say much. His tears spoke louder.
On Conner's worst days, those in the middle of treatment, all he could do was think about how much he didn’t want to be in the hospital and how far he was falling behind everyone else on the football field. Or he would let his mind drift to the 15% chance he wouldn’t beat this cancer.
“It crept into my head a little bit,” Conner says. “I know there was a story about the Butler basketball player (Andrew Smith). They said he was on one of his last treatments and he went up for a scan and the cancer had turned into something totally different that spread through his body. He lost his life to it. That scared me.”
Those moments of fear, however rare, and anxiety, however common, disappeared in an instant May 23, the day of his final scan. Conner walked into the Hillman Cancer Center around 10 a.m. for the scan that would tell him if he was officially in remission. While his mother sat and cried and prayed, he waited for the results … rather impatiently.
“He literally just stepped out of the scanner, and he called me,” Marks says. “I said, ‘Well, give me at least a few minutes because we've got to get the films.’ ”
Another 15 minutes passed as Marks checked in with a radiologist. As he moved through the hospital, nurses, secretaries and all sorts of hospital employees whom Conner had come to know over the previous six months looked up at the doctor and asked the same question: How was James’s scan?
“Everyone was just so excited — the nurses, everyone,” Marks says. “The people in the lab … everyone is just so thrilled.”
He made the call he loves to make, catching Conner in the car with his mother and close family friend Mike Gallagher, who captured the moment on film. As Conner smiles and thanks Marks over and over again, his mom is wailing in the backseat.
“I’m thinking like oh my gosh, they can't come back and tell me it's not gone,” Patterson says. “They can't. They just can't. That was pretty rough. … It was such a relief, because I'm thinking of all of the moms that didn't get that call, didn't get that answer they were hoping for. I couldn't imagine not getting the answer that I got.”
Says Conner: “It was just a huge relief off my shoulders. The best day ever. It takes a toll on you. When you first wake up in the morning to you go to bed at night, it's on your mind. You're constantly reminded of things you can't do.”
Not anymore. Now, he’s reminded of all he can do, and what he has done.
Conner will continue to get scans every two or three months.
When Conner's mother thinks of cancer now, she thinks of her son as a strong, brave young man who waged his toughest battle with everyone watching.
“It does look like that, but it also looks like the worst of this: Heartbreak, angst, sickness, sadness and despair,” Patterson says. “It's so hard to think about all the people who did have spirit, and did have fight, but couldn't beat it, because it was too much. It's an awful, awful thing.
“Thank God we have a great ending, but it's hard to think about everybody who doesn't. It's heartbreaking. I can't think about other moms who have gone through it and didn't have this outcome. I don't know what I would do.
“How do you come back from that? You don't. You really don’t.”
