When Matt Nuernberg was rushed into emergency surgery because of stomach pains in July, he didn’t think much of it beyond the pain.
When he woke up three days later, on July 17, and was told he had Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare form of cancer, Nuernberg was stunned, but not altogether devastated – after all, his mother, an aunt, uncle and grandfather all had it at one point.
But when his hair fell out during a shower after his first round of chemotherapy on Aug. 3, his situation became real.
“I always joked with my mom and my family about it that you can kind of hide being skinny and tall and lanky, but the day my hair fell out it kicked in and I was in it,” said Nuernberg, a senior.
Sometime during the three months between his diagnosis and his fourth and final round of chemo, Nuernberg realized he wanted to play hockey again.
“I missed the game,” he said.
Now that he’s back, he wants to do anything he can to get the Ducks back to a Pac-8 title.
“Any way I can contribute to that is all I can really ask for and all I can expect,” Nuernberg said.
On the surface, it seemed an obvious choice for the Minnesota native who has played since he was 7 years old. As a freshman and sophomore at Oregon, he earned all-Pac-8 honors as goaltender when the Ducks won the Pac-8 title his freshman year and played for the title the next.
But he didn’t play last season, a “personal decision” he made. After his cancer was discovered, “it definitely wasn’t on my priority list,” Nuernberg said.
When he left school for break last summer, neither was the thought of cancer. Before he flew home to Excelsior, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, he began to feel stomach pains, ones that didn’t stop when he began his summer job at a law firm in downtown Minneapolis. After excruciating pains on his drive home on July 14, Nuernberg underwent emergency surgery to separate his intestines, which had merged into one another. By the end of surgery, the doctors had removed eight centimeters of his intestine and the right third of his colon.
It wasn’t until they found a mass inside the intestines that doctors suspected cancer. In fact, they had been telling Nuernberg since his stomach aches began that he was fine. During a post-operation biopsy the mass was found to be Burkitt’s, a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that occurs in only 200 to 600 new patients in the U.S. each year, usually in children. According to the National Cancer Institute, 1 in 52 men and 1 in 61 women will have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in their lifetime.
After a regrowth appeared two weeks later, his oncologist decided on a four-month chemotherapy plan, with six days of treatment in the hospital followed by 14 days outside it. As soon as Nuernberg got out of the shower, he knew its emotional and physical toll had hit him far earlier than he had expected.
“I got out of the shower and I sat by myself for a while and kind of cried,” Nuernberg said. “It was one of those alone times, that I just don’t know how to explain it. I woke up the next morning, shaved my head and it was fine.”
His recovery through all four sessions of aggressive chemo and intrathecal therapy – where drugs are injected through the spine – was aided by the support of hundreds of friends. Nuernberg started a Facebook group, which still has 788 members, and a blog to keep his friends informed.
“When we heard about what he was going through, it was a huge impact on all of us,” teammate Jeff Gibb said. Nuernberg did his best to make every post true, not necessarily inspirational. In one, he noted he was on 11 different medications during one of his chemo rounds.
One of his supporters was Scott McCallum, the club ice hockey coach, a friend of Matt’s and a fellow Minnesotan. All along, their conversations had only been about Matt’s health. But during one call, they both brought up the possibility of playing again.
“We talked a lot through all of it and for a long time none of it was about me playing,” Nuernberg said. “In the same phone conversation, I had said something about it (playing) and he said he was thinking about asking me about it, too.
“The support from him, and all the coaches and the team made it a pretty easy decision to come back.”
On, Jan. 11, Nuernberg made his first start in the net in 23 months against Colorado. It wasn’t pretty – he got pulled in the first period. But it was necessary to get used to hockey’s rhythm and speed. The next week, he started in a win against Portland State. In two games, he has stopped 30 of 35 shots for the Ducks. Thursday night, in Oregon’s regular season finale, Nuernberg will make his third start.
His family is “ecstatic” to see Matt progressing so quickly, said his stepfather, Mark Miller. “He’s a competitor and so for us it was very encouraging that he wasn’t afraid to go back and play.”
His stepfather hasn’t been surprised by his quick progress.
“That’s just who Matt is,” he said. “This wasn’t going to slow him down.”
For the next year, Nuernberg must have blood work done each month in Portland, as well as a CT scan every three months. He expects that he will now complete his degree next fall, instead of finishing this June. Before cancer, the delay would have annoyed him. Now, it’s just part of the journey to him.
“Things that you worry about and stress about I no longer see them as a big deal,” Nuernberg said. “I’m not in any rush to get out of here and be done with it.”
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