Brian Drake is like a lot of Penn students. He spent the last two summers working for Morgan Stanley, he's from northeast Jersey and he's a big Giants fan.
And, like most Giants fans, he spent much of his team's Super Bowl loss to the Ravens pulling out his hair.
But Drake's hair came out in clumps.
"I was just ripping it out," the Wharton senior said. "And at the end of the game, my housemates were like, `Aw man, now you really look like a cancer patient.'"
Funny, because that's precisely what he was.
Early last August, Drake was excited. Heading into his third year as a linebacker on the Penn football team, he was in the best shape of his life. He was the biggest, strongest and fastest that he had ever been. He was going to get a shot.
Sure, Drake had been a freshman when Jim Finn carried the team to a title in '98. He got an Ivy League championship ring, but it doesn't really count if you don't play.
In '99, Drake saw some special teams action and lettered, but he didn't crack the linebacking rotation.
But now, in early August 2000, on a team that everyone knew could be really special, Drake saw his chance.
He'd still be a backup on the depth charts behind Dan Morris and Travis Belden, but the graduation of Jimmy Hisgen left a little more room at the top of the linebacking corps.
Plus, Drake had been great in spring ball, and he'd stayed in Philly all summer, working to be in shape by the time two-a-days started.
But then, disaster.
"I pulled my hamstring the first day of camp," Drake said. "We were doing some drill, and I was in an all-out sprint, when I just pulled up a little bit, and there was this pop."
Drake missed all of camp --ÿa good 20 or so practices. Twenty practices right at the beginning of junior year, a critical time for a college football player trying to work his way up. More often than not, your success on the field and in practice junior year determines how much playing time you get as a senior.
"It was devastating," Drake said with a little half-smile acknowledging that, at the time, he didn't know the half of devastation. "I thought, `Things couldn't be any worse, this is the low point. I've worked so hard, and now I've pulled my hamstring. A hamstring [means] you can't run. If you can't run, you can't play.'"
Drake eventually got over the hamstring injury and saw his playing time increase over the first three games, against Lehigh, Lafayette and Dartmouth. Against Columbia, he made two tackles and recovered a fumble in the best game of his collegiate career. He didn't know it at the time, but that would be his final game of the season.
Drake found the tumor on Sept. 30, except he didn't quite know it was a tumor.
"I started to notice a little discomfort in the Dartmouth game," Drake said. "So, I just figured maybe I took a shot, or whatever. It wasn't a lot of pain, but I figured I just got nicked there, you know, it happens in the course of a game."
Maybe I just took a shot... I figured I just got nicked. Even after the first surgery, the second, more serious surgery and the chemotherapy, Drake said this with a football player's careless invincibility. While he relived that moment in his life -- those few days when testicular cancer was "discomfort" -- Drake sounded, as he must have at the time, as though he only needed to walk it off.
The pain "kind of hung around the following week at Holy Cross," Drake continued. "It wasn't unbearable, but something was there, so I went to the trainers and said, `Yeah, I think I got hit in the nuts. It's been bothering me, I probably have a bruise or something. What should I do?'"
And this, right here, is pretty much the top of the rollercoaster, the moment before the precipitous drop.
The folks at Student Health didn't know what to do, so they sent Drake for an ultrasound.
In between his first trip to the doctor and the ultrasound, Drake played in the Columbia game and told his parents about the tests he was going to have.
"My sister was up from Florida" for the game, said Kathy Drake, Brian's mother. "It was the first time she had seen Brian play at all.
"After the game, we were all walking around campus, and my sister went into the bookstore, and that's when Brian turned to us and said, `I have a problem,' and it was just like somebody had stabbed me in the heart."
Drake's ultrasound was on that next Tuesday, at Presbyterian Hospital. The doctor came back, said, "There's definitely something there," and asked Drake to see a specialist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Drake went to see the HUP specialist that Thursday. His parents came down from Jersey to be with him.
The specialist "talked to me, and then he went to tell my parents, so I'm just sitting in the room by myself, kind of getting bad vibes," Drake said. "I remember just sitting there, thinking that my whole life could change in the next five minutes.
"I'm thinking, `Shit, if I am sick, this is going to be some serious stuff.'
"So the doc comes in, takes me into the room where my parents are. From my mom's face, she's obviously been crying. My dad's just kind of stone-faced."
The doctor then confirmed what had been in the back of Drake's mind the whole time.
"I was fighting back the tears," Drake said. "It's a lot to handle when you're 20 years old and you think you're invincible.
"Eventually [the doctor] left and gave me some time with my parents. My mom broke down, so obviously I couldn't hold back. I broke down for a couple of minutes."
Surgery was scheduled for the following Monday, and the doctor advised against Drake's playing in the Yale game.
After the Drakes finished up at HUP, Brian and his father, Ken, headed over to tell Al Bagnoli, Penn's football coach.
"I think [Bagnoli] figured we were coming in to talk about Brian's playing time," Ken Drake said.
"Obviously, Coach Bagnoli was shocked," Drake said. "He's just like, `That's not what I expected to hear in this conversation.' I mean, how do you react to something like that?"
Drake went home with his parents that afternoon, and drove up to New Haven, Conn., on Saturday with his father.
"It was strange, because just a couple days prior to that I was practicing," Drake said. "It was just the span of a week. Because Columbia was, you know, up here, top of the world, and Yale was as far down as you could imagine."
The first surgery, to remove the tumor, is called an Orchiectomy. It's basically a snip and clip job. The patient spends just 45 minutes to an hour on the table.
A four-inch incision is made on the "bikini line." The surgeon pushes the testicle up and out, cuts it free, and sews up the incision, a very simple procedure.
There are two kinds of cancer Drake could have had. Seminoma is a very localized type of testicular cancer that spreads very slowly, if at all. With this type of cancer, he would have been done after the first surgery.
Drake, however, had Nonseminoma, which is much more aggressive in proceeding to the lymph nodes in the lower abdomen, before moving on to the lungs, liver, bones and brain.
Drake had two options. He could have monitored the progress -- it was possible that the cancer had been caught early enough that it hadn't spread -- with CAT scans and X-rays. Or, he could have a major surgery called Retroperitoneal Lymph Node Dissection.
"Because the lymph nodes are in the back, they had to go in and scoop out all the intestines and bowels, plop them on a table to get to where the lymph nodes were and cut them out," Drake said. "What I'm looking for at this point is to get my life back on track as soon as possible. Plus I didn't want this dark cloud lingering over my head."
And just say, for a moment, that Drake elects not to have the surgery. He then busts his ass to get in shape for spring ball, busts his ass to be ready for camp, and then some doctor tells him, "Sorry, you're sick." There goes another season -- his final one -- down the drain.
The surgery was slated for Dec. 8, which meant that Drake got to watch from the sidelines as his teammates won an Ivy League championship with big comebacks and last-second nailbiters.
For two days prior to the surgery, Drake couldn't eat anything but Jello or broth or juice or water. He stayed with his parents in the Penn Tower Hotel the night before, waking up bright and early the next day. He was on the table being wired and prepped by 6 a.m.
Then they were giving him the gas, and the next thing Drake knew, it was 12 hours later. Waking up from the surgery was all bright and dark blurs and far-off sounds and repeated pressing of the button that activated the morphine drip, which only worked every 15 minutes anyway. Drake was sore from the 50 or so staples used to patch up the incision that had been made from just below his chest to just below his waistline.
Drake finally saw his parents the next day, when he woke up. Over the next five days, he saw a bunch of other people, too.
"I can't say enough about the guys on the team," Drake said, laughing. "There were times when people were just packed into my room. My mom tells a great story about this one time she came in. When she left me I was sleeping. When she came back, the room was packed. She can't find me. She looks in my bed, and I'm not even in it. [Then-backup quarterback Tom] DiMenna is in my bed and I'm in a chair with my robe on."
Drake's ordeal wasn't over. The lymph nodes had to be sent to Pathology and analyzed. If too many of the lymph nodes showed traces of spreading, then he would need chemotherapy anyway.
When Drake went down to HUP to have his staples removed, the surgeon said that only four of the lymph nodes had come back with traces -- he wouldn't need the chemo.
But two days later, Drake got some bad news: the numbers were right but the size was wrong. One of the lymph nodes was too big, which meant that Drake had to choose, once again, between monitoring or pursuing the cancer.
This time, the choice was between frequent CAT scans, X-rays and checkups, or a six-week dose of chemotherapy. Again, Drake chose pursuit.
"My attitude was to just go after it," Drake said. "It's thrown my life off track long enough, I want to make sure it's completely done and it never comes back."
Drake went back to HUP the last week of winter break and stayed in the hospital while he got his first week of chemo. The treatment was in three-week cycles. The first and fourth weeks were the most intensive, and each Monday, Drake got the most potent dose for the week.
Drake had expected chemotherapy to be a lot worse, especially what with all those horror stories out there. Drake had a nasty bout or two of chills, but he mainly just felt more tired than usual. He also lost a bunch of weight, down to 185 lbs. from his playing weight of 210. And, of course, his hair fell out.
Finally, six weeks after he started chemo, the cancer was gone.
About two weeks after Drake finished chemotherapy, the guys in his house threw the first annual "Drake Kicked Cancer's Ass" Party. It was the biggest party their house had ever held, complete with a giant, professionally-made poster. Drake's housemates even shaved their heads in tribute -- not out of sympathy, but admiration.
"If I get the flu, I'm bitching, I'm moaning, I'm calling my mom," defensive lineman Steve Moroney said. "The kid was a freakin' animal. I was like, `What do you mean you're not sick? What do you mean you don't feel bad?"
"I felt like I was dealing with it harder than he was," said Drake's housemate Dave Kiehn. "He handled himself with such grace and style, I can't even describe it."
It probably shouldn't be the epilogue to this story, but there's no way around it. Brian Drake is playing linebacker for the Penn Quakers again this season.
How'd he get there? Well, remember how he worked his ass off to get in the best shape of his life just over a year ago? He did the same thing again, except this time he started in the hole.
Drake read Lance Armstrong's book this summer, and found inspiration in the cycling champion's comeback, but one gets the impression that Armstrong had little, if anything to do with his return to the field. It was just Drake and the workout, Drake and the weights, Drake and his new scars.
"He's not the guy you read about in the paper," Moroney said. "He's not the guy that gets all the publicity. He did all this just so he could play one more game, one more season. And that's an inspiration."
