Lucas Brum
Professor Tierney
JRN 100
12/11/12
Nothing
can stop Gerry Ahearn
For most 8th graders, the things they are
thinking about the most are their schoolwork, what they want for Christmas that
year, or what it’s going to be like when they get to high school. When Gerry
Ahearn of Holtsville, New York was in the 8th grade, his main
concern was fighting for his life.
It’s been a tough battle for Ahearn ever since he was
diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that affects bone and
tissue, in October 2005. Going through many surgeries and countless agonizing
chemotherapy sessions, Ahearn has been through hell and back. And despite the
odds being stacked against him, he has won the ultimate battle. Not once, not
twice, but three separate times, Ahearn has beaten cancer.
Now 20 years old, Gerry Ahearn is a junior at Farleigh
Dickinson University in Hackensack, New Jersey where he is studying filmmaking
and has maintained above a 3.0 grade point average. He still has routine
check-ups and treatments to make sure the cancer is contained, but still
maintains a normal life. Ahearn is a huge inspiration to his friends, family,
community, and to anyone else who is going through the same thing he went
through.
“What Gerry has been through is incredible. The way he
has handled this whole situation is absolutely amazing,” said his friend Eric
Brill. “It really is an absolute honor to be friends with him and to see what
he went through. It makes me realize that my life is pretty good. He is and
always will be one of my heroes,” he added.
In October of 2005, Ahearn started to notice some
swelling in his lower left leg. It didn’t really bother him unless it was
touched, so he didn’t think much of it. Then one day at football practice, he
awkwardly fell on his leg and aggravated it. The coaches sent him to the
trainer at the high school to get it checked out. “When she saw it, she touched
it, and then jumped back in horror,” he said. This led to the family calling a
specialist to schedule an MRI to get it checked out. Two days after the MRI,
Ahearn and his parents met with a specialist in Manhattan, New York where he
performed a biopsy to see what the issue with the leg was. The biopsy showed
that it was Ewing’s Sarcoma. Further test showed that it spread to his lungs
and brain.
“My family took it as it came,” Ahearn said. “Everything
happened so fast there wasn’t really anything else we could do,” he added.
“It certainly was devastating for my family and I to hear
that news,” said his father Gerry Ahearn, a retired New York Police Department
detective. “But we knew we couldn’t dwell on it and we had to make sure we showed
we were going to be strong with him and support him no matter what,” he added.
Even though his parents didn’t necessarily show their
devastation, Ahearn knew how his parents felt. And he feels that just hearing
that he had cancer wasn’t the worst thing they heard.
“What I think was most difficult for my parents was
hearing that the doctors were giving me a 10% chance to live because of how
much the cancer had spread in only 3 months,” he said.
This news hurt the family tremendously, but they couldn’t
waste time dwelling on it. Ahearn started chemotherapy shortly after he was
diagnosed. He would go to the hospital for treatment every two week for three
to six days, followed by two weeks off. This was the routine that he would
follow, but only after his first treatment, which was almost a year long.
“The first time I went for treatment it was 11 ½ months
long, which was only supposed to be 9 months, but because of surgeries (one
brain surgery to remove the tumor and two on my leg, the biopsy and the surgery
to remove the tumor and two-thirds of my fibula) and infections, it had to be
extended and pushed back,” he said.
Chemotherapy is extremely grueling and can really take a
toll on a person physically and mentally. But there was always something that
kept Ahearn motivated. “What kept me motivated was a desire to just go back to
normal, the way I was before getting sick- going to school, playing
football/lacrosse, going out with friends, just anything other than sitting
alone, in my house, staring at the same walls over and over again,” he said.
After more than a year of surgeries and chemotherapy, the
cancer went into remission. Ahearn and his family were ecstatic. He couldn’t
wait to finally get some normalcy in his life. “Time heals all wounds” is what
he would keep telling everyone. The first step in getting back his normal life
is going back to school. He went back in the middle of his freshman year of
high school. He knew that going from middle school to high school would be a
challenge. “I went back to school with only the few friends I
had known since I was in elementary school, and I think it was an act of God
how good my friends were because they stood by me and helped me adjust. I knew
almost no one, and in a school as big as Sachem East, it was tough,” he said.
Ahearn remained cancer free until the summer leading into
his junior year, when during a football workout he began to feel very ill. He
was rushed to the hospital with symptoms similar to a stroke. An MRI showed that
a tumor that was growing on a blood vein in his brain, which burst during the
workout. After another surgery to remove the pieces, his doctors decided that
because bone cancers are believed to begin in the bone marrow, that a stem cell
transplant was the best option to kill the cancer once and for all.
Ahearn went into extreme, vivid detail to describe how
painful a stem cell transplant is. He says it’s “the worst situation a human
can be in, because so much can go wrong for no reason and with no immunity, the
risk of death is around every corner.” He also compared the feeling of the
transplant to a scene in one of the Harry Potter movies. “The only way I can
compare it is to how they decries the “dementors” in Harry Potter. They suck
every possible good feeling from you and leave you in the worst possible state
anyone can ever feel. Everything throbs, everything swells, you can barely see,
you just feel like death,” he said.
A person with a weak sense of determination and a weak will
to live would probably have given up. But he fought his hardest every day to go
through the excruciating rounds of chemotherapy and stem cell transplants with
100% effort. And all that hard work paid off when the cancer went back into
remission. But shortly after, the tumor reappeared in his brain. Since it is so
rare to go through treatment this many times on a patient with Ewing’s Sarcoma,
they have to use different experimental methods to see what will work best.
Ahearn is still receiving treatment and routine check-ups, but that hasn’t
stopped him from living a normal life that he lives today.
Every person has someone that they look up to, especially
in their time of need. For Ahearn, it was his grandmother, Diane, who also
battled cancer. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1991. And despite the
doctors saying she only had six months to live, she battled the cancer for over
12 years before she died in 2003. That gave Ahearn a tremendous amount of
motivation to fight this battle with everything he had. “After knowing her
story and seeing her continue to fight without giving up, I just knew that no
matter what I couldn’t just quit, and if I could beat this, there was nothing
in life I couldn’t do. I fear no evil, and I fear no death because no matter
what life threw at that frail old woman, she turned around and punched it right
in the mouth. Life is a fight. No matter what you throw the last punch, and
make it count,” he said.
That is the embodiment of a true warrior. No matter what
the circumstances, you fight with everything you have until you just can fight
anymore. It’s that attitude that makes Gerry Ahearn a true inspiration to
anyone he knows. “I know that he has way harder than I do, so I do my best to
cherish everything I have, because you never know what will happen,” said his
friend Joe Mignone.
Ahearn wants his story to inspire others to push through
whatever trouble they are having in their lives, because there is so much to
live for. He said, “My main goal was to not be remembered as ‘that kid who had
cancer’, but as something more, something that could represent me as more than
just someone who had tough s*** growing up, and that desire ended up helping me
not care about fear because over time I realized it didn’t matter, what
mattered was that in the end, I had actually done something with myself instead
of being dependent on others.”
Ahearn
was recognized throughout his area for his determination and his efforts in
battling cancer. He was award his high school team’s Gold Helmet Award, given
to the toughest player on the team and the player who embodies what being a
part of that team is all about. He was also given the Suffolk County 12th
Man Award for efforts in battling cancer.
Despite everything
that Gerry Ahearn has been through, he has remained positive about life and
will continue to fight any obstacle that comes his way.
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