Tony Corrente's story about how his cancer was discovered. He was the ref for the lions sainsts wild card game. Kind of crazy. Same way the discovery of brain tumor in the trade with washington.
Today's a big day for Corrente. Less than two days after serving as ref and crew chief at the game in New Orleans, Corrente is beginning his second course of debilitating chemotherapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
To this day, Corrente is still blown away by what might have saved his life: a mini-brawl in the season-opening Baltimore-Pittsburgh game.
Corrente, a trim, veteran referee, felt fine and was in excellent physical condition entering the season. In the second half of the game at Baltimore, he stepped in the middle of some pushing and shoving between two Steelers and two Ravens, and he found himself shoved hard out of the scrum. He landed on his back and hit his head, and he felt it the rest of the game.
Afterward, with pain in his head, back and buttocks, Corrente had a choice in the referee's room -- Tylenol or Motrin. And he remembered a former member of his crew saying Motrin was better for pain, so he took 800 milligrams of Motrin and flew home to California.
At home, he noticed he was coughing up blood, and still was the next day. More Motrin. The next week, after doing the Kansas City-Detroit game, Corrente was still taking Motrin, and noticed when he woke up Monday after the game there was blood on his pillow where his mouth had been. His doctor in California, Susan Sleep, set him up with an ear, nose and throat specialist, who snaked a camera through his nose to look at everything.
The camera spied a mass at the base of his tongue, where the tongue led into the throat, extending down the throat slightly. The mass was about the size of a full male thumb.
"What is that?'' Corrente asked the doctor.
"Sir, that is cancer,'' said the doctor, whose specialty was apparently not bedside manner.
"Excuse me,'' Corrente said. "I've got WHAT?''
After more tests and seeing a second expert at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Corrente would have a choice: get the tumor removed surgically, which carried some significant risks about future speaking ability and throat damage; or shrink it and eliminate it through chemotherapy and radiation. "The doctors believed the survival chance was about equal,'' Corrente told me Sunday afternoon. "So that made it a fairly easy choice.'' In late October, after returning from reffing the Tampa Bay-Chicago game, he began a seven-week course of chemotherapy.
"Every doctor I saw would look at me and tell me how lucky I was,'' Corrente said.
Huh?
"Getting knocked down and hurt in that Baltimore game might have saved my life,'' he said. "Then I started taking Motrin, which I found out causes your blood to thin. It broke through blood vessels and would come out when I coughed. Obviously, you've got to find out why that's happening. Had I not done anything, or had I taken Tylenol, which doesn't cause your blood to thin, I probably wouldn't have discovered this for a while -- and by then, I'd have needed massive surgery, and who knows what chances I would have had.''
At first, the chemo did little to him physically. But he began to lose his hair and look pale; at one point he had a bad skin rash. The Colts found out what ailed Corrente, and Peyton Manning, before the Nov. 27 Colts game against Carolina, gave Corrente a hug. "We heard,'' Manning said. During a TV timeout, Corrente was told Colts coach Jim Caldwell wanted to see him.
"He took both my hands, right there on the field,'' Corrente said. "And he said, 'I just wish you all the best. Our whole organization is praying for you.' ''
After that game, the treatments weakened Corrente to the point where he had to miss three weeks of work. Five days after he finished his last chemo treatment, he said he felt good. "A hundred percent,'' he said. "So I called [NFL officiating czar] Carl Johnson and told him I felt fine and I was ready to work. I said, 'I wouldn't come back unless I felt 100 percent.' ''
So he worked the last two weekends of the season, Minnesota at Washington on Dec. 24 and Baltimore at Cincinnati eight days ago.
"Before that game, I went to coach [John] Harbaugh of the Ravens, and told him I'd like to talk to a couple of his players if it wouldn't be too much of a bother before the game. I told him the story, and he was in disbelief. So they brought the two players who were in the scuffle with the Steelers that first week, Michael Oher and Matt Birk, out to talk to me. I told them, 'I just wanted to tell you that you actually may have saved my life.'
"I could see they were shocked as I explained it. This crazy ref was thanking them because they knocked him on his butt.''
Postseason assignments are made based on performance during the season. Corrente was told his crew would be working one of the wild-card games, and he was thrilled -- as much for his crew as for himself. He thought of his umpire, Fred Bryan, who collapsed late in the season with a blood clot in his lung and wouldn't be able to work the playoff game. "It would have been his first playoff game,'' said Corrente. "That really bothered me, that he'd miss it.''
It bothered Corrente that he wouldn't get to work another playoff game, even if his crew's performance warranted it according to the grading scale the NFL uses. He told them he wouldn't be available. Several weeks of arduous treatment lay ahead.
"There's going to be some dark days ahead,'' Corrente said.
Corrente found it interesting that he made it through the Saints-Lions game with no pain, no sore throat, no lack of energy. He had the presence of mind to -- correctly -- rule the Brees fumble/no-fumble a fumble when Brees was hit before he tried to throw the ball, though the play was incorrectly ruled because another crew member ruled an incomplete pass. But Sunday, he had a sore throat. His body felt sore. It's like he'd conditioned himself to make it through the game, knowing a tough regimen was ahead, and when the game was over, his body stopped protecting him.
As well as the chemo, Corrente will begin a new round of radiation treatments. He described it as being bolted down on a table and shot with radiation from 10 different angles for between 15 and 35 seconds. His throat will blister. He won't be able to talk. He'll have a very hard time swallowing. He'll lose all sensation of taste, which won't be much of a change. "Food, to me, is repulsive right now,'' he said.
Ask him about the future, and he can't tell you. His doctors say he came through the first two-plus months of treatment well, but they don't know what the future holds. As a former high school baseball coach, Corrente's been given some baseball allegories by one of his chemotherapy docs. "He told me, 'We just scored a couple of runs, but we're only in the sixth inning -- and the other guys have some good hitters coming up,' '' said Corrente.
He's heard from coaches, players, league officials, fellow officials, all wishing him well. "You hear it's the No Fun League, or it's Not For Long,'' said Corrente. "I'll tell you what the league is -- it's the National Family League. I've learned my glass isn't half-full. It's been full my whole life, and it's full now.''
And he's looking forward to next season, if for no other reason than to look up Ryan Mundy and LaMarr Woodley of the Steelers. They're the two players who jousted with Birk and Oher. Corrente can't wait to tell them how they might have helped save his life.