Adam Deans survived osteosarcoma | bone cancer | distal femur | prosthetic leg

DESCRIPTION

Adam Deans was an athletic teenager and had aspirations of becoming a professional athlete.  However, all that changed when he fell down a flight of stairs at school.  At first, doctors thought Adam had dislocated his left knee, but upon getting further medical attention, tests showed he had cancer, known as osteosarcoma in his distal femur.  Doctors recommended chemotherapy, but when that was ineffective, the leg was amputated in 2005.  In 2008, a friend introduced Adam to wheelchair basketball.  Still with his athletic prowess, he learned the sport quickly and became good at it, eventually the Australian national team.  It won the world championship in 2014 and in 2016, Adam played for the national team at the Paralympics at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Adam retired from wheelchair basketball in 2017, but now married with two children, he is happy with his life. He shares his story with the @CancerInterviews podcast.

Adam wanted to become a professional football player in his native Australia.  He seemed positioned for such a pursuit until one day in his final year of high school when his leg broke as he was going down a flight of stairs.  Rushing him to the hospital, paramedics initially thought Adam had dislocated his left knee and tried popping it back into place; but at the hospital, tests showed he was going downstairs with a broken distal femur, broken because of the presence of a cancerous tumor.

He soon learned he had osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer.  Not only that, but at age 17, he would have to have his left leg amputated, followed by two rounds of chemotherapy.  He was gratified to experience very few of the nasty side effects that come with chemo, the worst being hair loss.

Like most teenagers, Adam wanted to fit in with his peers.  He wondered how that could happen and wondered if girls would find him attractive.  That was in 2005.  In 2008, a friend overcame a great deal of resistance and persuaded Adam to attend a wheelchair basketball practice.  At first, Adam was intimidated at the prospect of simultaneously handling a basketball and a wheelchair, but his athletic prowess kicked in.  He made the local team in Perth, then found a spot on the powerful Australian national team.

In 2014, the Aussies won the wheelchair basketball world championship and was favored to win gold in the paralympics at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  However, the squad came home without a medal after it was eliminated in the quarterfinals.  The following year, Adam retired from competitive wheelchair basketball, but his story should be a source of inspiration for anyone whose cancer diagnosis will result in disability.  He has gone on to get married and has two children.

By way of advice, Adam Deans says anyone diagnosed with cancer should not try to proceed by themselves.  He says anyone diagnosed should not be afraid to lean on others because “that’s what loved ones are for.”

Additional Resources:

Support Group: Sock It To Sarcoma  https://www.sockittosarcoma.org.au

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings.  This is the @CancerInterviews podcast and I am your host, prostate cancer survivor Bruce Morton.  Our guest on this episode has overcome so much.  His story should be a major source of inspiration for anyone who listens.  Adam Deans of Perth, Australia, had aspirations to be a professional athlete.  Then he fell down some stairs at his school, and that changed everything.  He was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, but bounced back in a major way to compete in the paralympics.  Settle in for a compelling story, and Adam, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Adam Deans: That’s a very kind introduction, Bruce, and thank you for having me.

BM: It is our custom to start out by learning a bit more about our guests and their lives away from cancer, so if you would Adam, tell us a bit about where you are from, what you have done for work and what you like to do for fun.

AD: Not a lot of time for fun.  I have a ten-month-old and an almost four-year-old at home and quite busy with work, so, fun time isn’t plentiful, I guess you would say spending time with them is what I do for fun.  I am a long way from where you are, in Perth, Western Australia.  I believe it is the most isolated capital city in the world.  People refer to it as a very big mining town, which is quite true.  Almost half the people that live here work in mining to some degree

BM: Adam, your cancer journey sadly began in a most unusual way.  Tell us about it.

AD: I thought I had a sports-related injury, a sore knee, and as one who aspired to play one day in the Australian Football League, I thought I would simply play through it and thought I would be okay.  But when walking down stairs at school, my leg ended up breaking, I fell down, tried to get up and my leg was in excruciating pain.  My head was in my hands.  I looked up and what seemed like half the school was looking on.  I was screaming in pain, and no one really knew what to do.  One of the students left, got a wheelchair, put me up on it.  All I was worried about was my drink in one hand and a sandwich in the other.  One of my mates took them from me and that was all I was worried about at the time, but the worry definitely became a bit more serious than that.  The paramedics thought I had a dislocated kneecap.  I had actually broken my leg, but they were trying to put my kneecap back into place.  You can imagine how painful and unenjoyable that was.  Once they figured out it was a broken leg and not a dislocated kneecap, I was in the ambulance and on the way to the hospital.

BM: Adam, what you’re describing does sound like kind of a sports injury and at first blush, it would seem like there is a great bit of daylight between an injury like that and a diagnosis of cancer.  If you would, fill in the gap.  What was the chain of events that led to your diagnosis?

AD: So, I get to the hospital and the questions were asked.  They wanted to know how does a young, fit, healthy seventeen-year-old walk downstairs and break their leg?  The femur is the strongest bone in your body, but I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in my distal femur, the bone closest to my knee.  Then they if I was pushed down the stairs, which I wasn’t.  After a lot of tests and operations and biopsies and PET scans revealed that the reason my leg had broken was because I had that tumor in my left distal femur.  It is a bit like a rubber band.  Every step I was taking was like I was pulling on that rubber band ever so slightly, but eventually if you pull it too far, it broke.  That’s the best analogy I can give regarding my femur, so that last step I took on those stairs is the step that broke the rubber band.  In the end, I was quite fortunate to have the cancer detected at that early stage as opposed to it being detected years later after it had possibly spread.  That led to leg amputation and nine months of chemotherapy. 

BM: By the way, we hope you will find time to like and subscribe.  And if you click the bell icon, you will be notified anytime we post an interview.  We also want to remind you we are not distributors of medical advice.  If you seek medical advice, please contact a licensed health care professional. 

So, I have sort of a two-part question for you, Adam, and sadly both parts of this question are rather grisly.  First off, we already know that the day one is diagnosed is a terrible day, but each diagnosis is different, each person is different.  Given your particulars, how did you handle this awful news?

AD: In Australia, we have a public and a private health care system.  I was in the public system because of my breaking my leg.  I received a phone call and went from having a doctor to having a professor and that switched from the public system to a private room.  The writing was on the wall that it was something more than a broken leg.  I had known the professor and we had had a jovial relationship.  As I saw him, he called my mom and dad into his room, and he searched for the right words to tell us all that I had bone cancer and my leg was going to have to be amputated, plus nine months of chemotherapy.  In my head, I thought that has an end date.  When he said I would have to have my leg amputated, that was a forever thing and that was the hardest thing to stomach at the time.  Ironically, if you ask me today, the chemotherapy was actually harder to deal with than the amputation.  At the time, I felt like my world was over.  I am not going to walk again and I wondered if a girl was ever going to look at me the same again, am I going to play sport again, are my friends still going to want to be my friends, can I be independent again?  A lot of questions went through my head.

BM: Adam, you already answered the second part of my two-part question because as you have stated, there were multiple implications that come with the news of your amputation.  Of all of those implications, which one was the toughest for you?

AD: I think at the time, just people not understanding.  Teenagers try so, so hard not to be different.  They all do the same things, they all wear the same clothes, they do the same pastimes and hobbies.  I went from being one of the popular kids you might say, and that didn’t change, but suddenly I was exceedingly different.  Problems that my friends had, such not playing well at football on the weekend was the biggest problem they had, whereas I was going through life-changing problems, so that was my biggest challenge at the time.

BM: Now let’s go to the chemotherapy piece.  There is no such thing as a pleasant chemotherapy experience, so what was the toughest part of the chemo?

AD: The not knowing what it was at the start, the unknown.  I have always been someone who, once I know what I am in for, I can mentally prepare for it.  Even as a seventeen-year-old, you hear about it a helluva lot, but at that age I never thought I would be going through it.  The unknown was the hardest part.  You’re sitting there, you’re waiting for the side effects to kick in.  I was extremely naïve, and eventually had two rounds of chemotherapy before I had my leg amputated in hopes that the tumor would possibly be shrunk.  Unfortunately, it turned out I had quite an aggressive tumor, so there was no way of salvaging my leg, so after two rounds, the leg was amputated.  I had the first round of chemo at the hospital and the second as an outpatient.  A pivotal moment that I will never forget was when my hair started falling out and I had clumps of hair in my hand.  I asked the barber to give me the shortest buzzcut he could.

BM: However, while all this was going on, you started gravitating toward a return to sport.  Our interviews are usually about cancer and not about sport, but sport plays a role in your story, Adam.  Tell us about the first baby steps you took toward engaging in competitive sport.

AD: Yeah, it took a while for me to accept that I had a disability, but finished Grade 12, then went on to my first year outside of high school.  I was lost.  I was trying to find myself.  I was lost.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do for work.  I had some friends who were exceedingly supportive through my cancer journey, some that weren’t there at all for me.  It was very tough learning who my true friends were.  Meanwhile, it took me a while to get into wheelchair basketball.  I didn’t want to classified as someone with a disability, but three years later, at age 21, I was pretty much dragged down to a wheelchair basketball game.  I working at the time at a place where they make prosthetic legs and co-worker played wheelchair basketball.  He thought I would be really good because I am tall.  He said I should really give it a go.  I wasn’t ready for it, but he kept pressing me on it, so I thought I would go to a practice and get it over with.  I went there for the first time in 2008.  At the time, four of the starting players on the national team were from Perth and they were at the gym when I showed up.  I thought it would be just a social catchup, then a bit of basketball on the side, but it was sport that I knew, sport with a coach and a whistle and a clipboard and yelling at the players and telling them what to do.  I got in the chair, looked at the ball, looked at the wheels of the chair and wondered how I could carry the ball and push the wheels of the chair.  The first time I tried it, it was really different.  I didn’t know how to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ with the ball.  I have always picked up sports very naturally and very quickly, as a child and into my teenage years, but wheelchair basketball was not the same.  I didn’t want friends to watch me because I wasn’t picking it up as quickly as I would like.  The first person to watch me was my sister.  The first thing she said after I was done was, “You’re not good.”  But it was always my attitude that if people told me I wasn’t good at something, I was determined to show them they were wrong.

BM: As we mentioned at the beginning, your ascent as a para athlete culminated with your being part of the Australian national team that went to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.  If you would, tell us what it was like to get to that mountaintop.

AD: That was the planned mountaintop, definitely.  It was the assumed mountaintop, which is why it ended not being the mountaintop.  I had made a quick rise with the Perth team and then the national team.  Once 2013 hit, I was regular on the twelve-man roster, 2013 through 2017, but the mountaintop ended up being 2014 when we won the world championship in Korea.  In Rio, I don’t want to say it all fell apart, but as a team, the players and the coaches, we became quite complacent.  We just assumed we could win easily like we had done the four previous years.  Unfortunately, we were the hunted, everyone was trying to beat us, we lost the quarterfinal and went home without a medal.  Then in 2017, I retired.

BM: You had mentioned that when you were diagnosed, you learned who your true friends were, but you had support from an external source, the Perth-based organization, Sock It To Sarcoma.  If you would, tell us about what Sock It To Sarcoma has done for you and what it can do for others.

DA: I have been involved with Sock It To Sarcoma for years, although less than I would like to have been, but I have been involved since its very early days.  I got to know the motivation behind Sock It To Sarcoma.  It supports people with sarcoma.  It raises funds for research for sarcoma.  It provides funds for health services. 

BM: And there is a website for Sock It To Sarcoma.  It is https://www.sockittosarcoma.org.au.  All right, Adam, we are going to close out and we will conclude the way we usually do with the following question.  Imagine your encountering someone diagnosed with osteosarcoma or any other type of cancer that might leave the patient with a disability.  This person may have lots of questions, you might have lots of answers, but if there was one thing you said that you wanted to make sure wouldn’t be forgotten, what would it be?

DA: Don’t try to do anything on your own.  Everyone has got people around them, whether it is three people or 3,000 people that want to help and want to be part of that support network.  You need that mental and emotional support.  It takes a village, is the saying.  I definitely was quite stubborn.  My wife says I still am.  You can’t do it all alone.  Your support network is there, and you are going to need them.  Find out who those people are who really want to be there for you.  I was very lucky that I had a multitude of people that were there for me, but find out who your support network is and lean on them.  It is okay to do that.  In the end, that is what your loved ones are there for, to pick you up when you’re down.  That would be my advice.

BM: Excellent advice and an outstanding story.  Adam Deans, Perth, Western Australia, Australia, and Adam, again lots of great information that is also inspirational.  Adam, thanks for being with us on Cancer Interviews.

DA: No worries at all, Bruce.  Thanks for having me.

BM: This brings to a close another episode of Cancer Interviews.  We want to remind you as we always do when we close that if you are on a cancer journey, you are not alone.  There are individuals like Adam Deans, there are organizations like Sock It To Sarcoma that can make your cancer journey a bit easier.  So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.

Additional Resources:

Support Group:

Sock It To Sarcoma: https://www.sockittosarcoma.org.au

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Adam Deans, Bone Cancer Survivor – Perth, Australia

Adam Deans was an athletic teenager and had aspirations of becoming a professional athlete.  However, all that changed when he fell down a flight of stairs at school.  At first, doctors thought Adam had dislocated his left knee, but upon getting further medical attention, tests showed he had cancer, known as osteosarcoma in his distal femur.  Doctors recommended chemotherapy, but when that was ineffective, the leg was amputated in 2005.  In 2008, a friend introduced Adam to wheelchair basketball.  Still with his athletic prowess, he learned the sport quickly and became good at it, eventually the Australian national team.  It won the world championship in 2014 and in 2016, Adam played for the national team at the Paralympics at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Adam retired from wheelchair basketball in 2017, but now married with two children, he is happy with his life.

Additional Resources:                                                                                                                                

Sock It To Sarcoma: https://www.sockittosarcoma.org.au

Time Stamps:

03:30 Adam’s cancer journey beganin Grade 12 when he fell down a flight of stairs.

05:36 Explains what led to his diagnosis.

08:07 His reaction to learning he would need to have a leg amputated, plus two rounds of chemotherapy.

11:34 Adam shares the toughest part of having his left leg amputated.

12:50 The toughest part of chemotherapy.

16:38 Recalls getting involved in competitive sports.

23:34 Adam describes his experience at the 2016 Paralympics.

32:12 His advice to others learning their cancer diagnosis will result in disability.

KEYWORDS (tags):

bone cancer

osteosarcoma

chemotherapy

adam deans

distal femur

paralympics

prosthetic leg