Former Ipswich Town player Jason Cundy has talked about his battle with testicular cancer as part of Men’s Health Week. In an interview with Ross Halls, the talkSPORT anchor shared her thoughts.
Jason Cundy got the shocking news in February 1997. carcinoma of the testicles at the age of 27. Just four months prior, he had moved from Tottenham to Ipswich Town. “In the week building up to a home game against Oxford United I noticed that one of my testicles was completely different then the other – it was large, heavy and looked really strange,” he says. “I attributed it to the fact that my glands were enlarged within my groynes due to an infection from an infected shin cut that I had stitches for. “When I presented it to Dave Williams, the physiotherapist, on the day of the game, he chuckled because it appeared to be rather humorous.Then he remarked, “I should see Dr. Steve Lazar, the club doctor.” He came in to have a look at it around an hour and a half before kickoff when I was receiving a message on the bench. He shouted, “You can’t play today; you need to go to the hospital,” as soon as he saw it.
‘Look, I’m playing, we can do this later,’ I told him. I do recall thinking, “What is this?” when the ball left the field of play and I was staring down at the grass. The game resumed after cancer briefly entered my thoughts for a nanosecond.They scheduled a 9 a.m. scan for me at Ipswich Hospital on Monday. Two nurses were waiting for me outside when I arrived after driving up from London. After entering and completing the necessary paperwork, I was on a table getting an ultrasound in less than three minutes. After doing this ultrasound for ten or twenty seconds, the technician said, “Yes, this will need to come from.
You can picture how shocked they were. My hands were getting cold. I was full of questions. “Is that a tumour?” “Yes.” “Is it cancerous?” “We have to find out, but we don’t know yet.”Upon returning home, I saw my wife sobbing uncontrollably. When my mother arrived, she was in tears. “After the news hit home for me, I was truly okay with it. Perhaps foolishly, I didn’t give it much thought. I thought to myself, ‘I’m 27 and fit’. At my current age, I believe I would handle the phone call very differently.”
When I returned to the hospital the following day, everyone was waiting for me. When I awoke after the testicle was removed, the pain was unbelievably intense. I was just given more morphine to put me out of my misery once more.”I spent a day or two in the hospital before returning home to recuperate, and it took around ten days to determine whether the condition was malignant. Although there was no internet back then, I knew I had all the symptoms of testicular cancer since I had done as much research as possible. I therefore assumed that this was cancer. In the end, we travel back to Ipswich for a meeting, and he just said ‘I’m sorry to tell you but it’s cancerous’.
While my wife is crying, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Well, what’s the next step?’ since, in my mind, I’ve already handled it.”I got blood tests, scans, and X-rays, and fortunately, it hadn’t spread to my lymph nodes. It is more difficult for the testicle to spread because of its location away from the body. It was a blessing that I caught it early.”I went into the club to discuss my options with them even though it was scheduled for me to receive chemotherapy the following week.It was somewhat solemn when I broke the news of the cancer to Dave Williams, George Burley, the manager, and Mr. Sheepshanks, the chairperson, in the boardroom.
There are just men in there, and you could see they were thinking “s**t,” but I assured them that I was fine. “I said, ‘Look, it hasn’t spread, I’ve just been out for two weeks, so if I can put the chemo till the end of the season, I would,’ because we were aiming for promotion. However, the physicians didn’t accept it.It was quite a bizarre moment, listening to a home game on the radio the night before my chemotherapy in Ipswich the following week. “I made an attempt to get back in shape for that season, but it was useless. Chemo completely destroyed me.” Naturally, supporters were perplexed by the defender’s abrupt withdrawal. He says, “It was so secretive.” “I recall talking to an Ipswich Star reporter, and he mentioned that since I had suddenly vanished off the face of the planet, many people believed I had been done for drugs. People were attempting to piece together my whereabouts for a few weeks after I played versus Oxford without getting hurt, so they tried to figure out what was going on. “Being one of my closest friends, Adam Tanner was aware of it, as were one or two other players. Before a game, the entire team was informed. It was quite an emotional thing for me to undertake. I then conducted an interview with News of the World around the time of the playoffs.
After taking the summer off, I had a rough first ten games of the next season. George took me off soon before the hour mark because I was unable to run after we played Bradford away. I was apprehensive about the duration of the affects, but happily I was able to recover.” There was more negative news in 2002. “I was in remission, went to see my oncologist and he suggested that I have a biopsy on my other testicle because he felt that my circumstances indicated that it could appear again in the other side,” said Cundy. When I went to get the results of the biopsy, I discovered that there were precancerous cells there.
“It’s happening, but you could get it tomorrow, next month, or three years from now,” he stated. In the UK, just a few men per year make it to the other side as well, and I was one of them. It is understandable that losing one testicle is one thing, but losing both… As a man, that presents some pretty terrible issues. “Because I chose to undergo radiation therapy, which essentially destroys the testicle, I was unable to conceive naturally. But at that moment, I just wanted to survive since I had two sons.” Interestingly, Cundy remarried in 2015 and became a father once more.
He says, “My new wife didn’t have any kids when I met her, but she wanted them.” “The second time we had IVF, she became pregnant using part of my sperm that had been kept in a freezer at Cambridge for eighteen years! It’s a really crazy story. Because of the wonders of science, my third kid, who was born in 2000, is actually older than my twenty-four-year-old.”