By: Tony Cerino, 49, Testicular Cancer
June 1993. I was sixteen years old. The ACC championship was a few days behind us. I had pitched the season at a Jesuit high school in Connecticut and gone 9-3 my junior year with sixty strikeouts in sixty-eight innings. I threw in the low eighties. D1 scouts had been at my games. My coach had written my college recommendation letter that spring. He told the colleges to call him.
I was taking a shower one morning and I felt an ache that wasn’t supposed to be there. I checked. I felt something.
I went to the emergency room with what I thought was a routine problem. A doctor examined me. They drew blood. A nurse came in with the cart, took a few vials, walked them down to the lab. I did not think about it again. They sent me home with antibiotics and told me to follow up with a urologist in five days.
The urologist examined me briefly. The bloodwork from the ER was on his desk. One number was off the charts. Alpha-fetoprotein. AFP. A protein that healthy adults barely produce. Mine was high enough that he did not need an ultrasound to know what he was looking at.
Stage IIC nonseminoma. Testicular cancer.
I had an orchiectomy at a hospital in Connecticut that week. A bigger surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering a few weeks later, where the surgeon found cancer in seven of the eight lymph nodes he removed. Four cycles of cisplatin and etoposide chemotherapy through September and October. I dropped from 170 pounds to 137.
Before the chemo started, my father drove me to a clinic and made me bank sperm. I was sixteen. I told him I just wanted to survive the next month. He told me I might want kids someday. He was right. One of my children, born years later through IVF, came from the vials we stored that summer.
I survived. The cisplatin chemotherapy worked. I went back to school. I went back to baseball.
By senior year, I had gained some of the weight back. But the body that had been throwing in the low eighties was gone. The velocity was gone. The command was different. I went 4-4. The D1 scouts stopped coming. I went to one college for a semester and tried to walk on. I did not make the team. I transferred to another school for three semesters. Then a third for two. I never graduated from any of them. I kept rebuilding.
By twenty, I was at a junior college in Connecticut. Three years older than the typical freshman. My best friend had played there the year before, called the coach, and told him to give me a look. The coach took the call. He took me in. We worked hard to rebuild the body that cisplatin had taken apart. From 175 pounds to 200. From low eighties before I got cancer to topping out at 86 miles an hour.
In 1998, we won the NJCAA Division III national championship. The first Connecticut team to win one. I was the staff ace. I went 9-0 my sophomore year on a 44-5 team. Eight wins on the way to the title. The ninth win is what I have been doing ever since.
I built a career. I got married. I have wonderful children and a great life.
In 2025, more than thirty years after my original diagnosis, I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. The drug that saved me in my teens did its job. It also showed up again, decades later, in ways the original protocols did not predict. Here is what I want the AYA community to know.
The system that saves you stops watching long before the late effects show up. The follow-up window closes at five to ten years. The late effects of cisplatin chemotherapy are documented in the literature, occurring after 30 years. There is a gap. The AYA cohort is the one that lives long enough for the gap to matter.
If you are reading this in active treatment, the arc continues after you finish. Ask your team what they will watch for and at what intervals.
If you are reading this five or ten years out and you have been told you are cured, the arc is still moving. Find a clinician who knows what to monitor.
If you are reading this twenty or thirty years out, you are still on the arc. You can learn the literature. You can advocate for yourself. You can find others who are doing the same thing.
I am writing a book about long-term AYA survivorship called THE NINTH WIN. Ten percent of the proceeds will go to Stupid Cancer, so the organization can keep doing the work that needs to be done for AYA patients and survivors, even decades after the doctors may monitor them.