After a Year-Long Cancer Battle, Opening Day Has a Different Meaning for Trey Mancini
On the day he got the worst news of his life, Trey Mancini thought about how lucky he was.
That might not be your reaction if you were a 27-year-old Orioles first baseman coming off the best season of your career and you learned that you had colon cancer. But Mancini saw it differently.
“You’re not thinking about baseball or anything like that,” he says. “You just want to be alive.”
He was fortunate to find out that his life was in danger. He had felt no symptoms other than mild fatigue that he attributed to aging. His annual spring training physical showed slightly reduced iron levels. It was only because a diligent athletic trainer sent him for further tests that anyone realized anything was wrong. He might otherwise not have made a doctor’s appointment until it was too late.
So on the morning of March 6, 2020, he underwent an upper endoscopy and a colonoscopy. Doctors thought they might find stomach ulcers or celiac disease. Instead, they found a mass in the horizontal portion of his large intestine. That afternoon, a CT scan confirmed his tumor had not metastasized to other organs, meaning his cancer was stage II or III. (Eventually doctors would find cancerous cells in three lymph nodes, placing it at stage III.) And that night, he decided to see how much worse it could have been.
Google told him “how low your chances kind of get,” he says. The five-year survival rate for a patient with a tumor like Mancini’s was about 70%. The five-year survival rate for a patient with a tumor that had metastasized widely—which his likely would have if not for those low iron levels—was more like 14%. So Mancini sorted through his grief and fear and anguish and settled on a new feeling: gratitude.