Perhaps the most terrifying three words a doctor can tell a patient: You. Have. Cancer. No other medical term carries cancer’s weight, and none shares its singular connotative value of total destruction. Sure, other diseases are equally, if not more, devastating than cancer. But for the common man, for you and me, receiving a diagnosis of cancer feels like a death sentence. en, there are the survivors. To them, cancer brought life, not death. Instead of a terminal illness, it was a resurrection of sorts. New perspectives. New values. Healthier outlooks on life. Cancer for its survivors is the glorious abomination, the strange intermingling between the hellish and the divine. at road through hell to survival started innocently enough for Colquitt County High School’s head football coach, Rush Propst. In the spring of 2010, Propst lost his sense of taste. He wasn’t alarmed, primarily because it helped him shed a few unwanted pounds. “I was trying to cut back anyway and it was easier because my tastes were so different,” he says. “I thought, man, this weight loss is working.” However, that September, Propst developed a sore throat. “I thought it was just pine pollen or something,” he says. When the sore throat persisted, he made an appointment with Dr. Kirby Smith. “I thought it might be strep throat because several players were diagnosed with it,” he says. “I was using Chloraseptic spray by the gobs.” Propst says he took a variety of antibiotics that cleared up the sore throat, but his tastes never returned.
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Stefnie Propst, Rush’s wife, says her husband told her oen that he didn’t feel well that fall. “He just wasn’t himself,” she says. “I told Rush it had to be the sinus surgery he had in the spring.” He continued to lose an average of three pounds per week, largely because his food had little or no taste. One meal in particular, on October 1, 2010, stands out to Propst. He invited his coaches over to watch a football game between Alabama and Florida and grilled steaks for the occasion. “I remember cooking it for everyone and sitting back and not eating,” he says. “I took two bites of everything and it just did not taste good.” Aer that, his only meals were milkshakes. Propst would oen drink three per day. From July to November, he lost nearly 30 pounds. Two weeks aer his visit to Dr. Smith, Propst says a knot popped up. He visited Dr. Raymond Aldridge, who he says initially diagnosed it as a bronchial cle cyst — a fairly harmless lump that develops in the neck and can be removed or drained if infected. Dr. Aldridge drained the lump and sent off the fluid for testing. It came back negative and Propst continued preparing his squad for the 2010 playoffs. Just a few weeks later, however, the morning aer the Packers defeated Mill Creek in the quarterfinals, Propst discovered the knot had returned. “I was getting ready to come to work because we were playing Grayson in the semifinals that week,” he says. “It had grown back fast.”
Still, Propst put off seeing a doctor until aer the season. Stefnie Propst remembers that morning well. “He said that when we got finished [with the season] he would just have it drained again,” she says. Propst had the Packers in the middle of a playoff run that Moultrie had not seen in a decade. “I didn’t feel like I had time to deal with it,” he says. Propst’s Packers defeated Grayson before losing to Brookwood the next week in the Packers’ first state championship appearance since 1994. When the season ended, he called Dr. Aldridge again, who then recommended Propst have the knot removed. Propst, however, had promised to take his family to Disney World and postponed the surgery. He postponed it a second time to coach the Georgia-Florida War of the Border high school all-stars game. “I was just too busy,” he says. On January 11, 2011, Drs. Aldridge and Robert Brown removed the lump from his neck. Propst says neither immediately thought the lump looked cancerous but sent it off to Dr. Anthony Moser. e next few days were tense, as Propst waited for the doctor’s call. “I had the surgery on Tuesday,” he says. “By Friday I hadn’t heard anything, and I was nervous.” Dr. Brown called the following Tuesday, January 18, 2011, a date Propst says he will never forget. “I could tell by his voice something was disturbing him,” he says. Dr. Brown told Propst that the test had come back positive for squamous cell carcinoma.
Spring 2013