Hopkins 4K for Cancer

Tom Koenigs

Trip Year: 2008
School: JHU
Hometown: Longmeadow, Massachusetts
Email: tkoenig5@jhu.edu
Please support me by donating now: http://www.active.com/donate/hopkins4k/H4KTKoenig

I am a diehard Red Sox fan. So is my father. So when Boston’s promising 23-year-old pitcher Jon Lester was diagnosed with early stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the summer of 2006, I immediately called my dad. “It’s fine,” my pragmatic father said. “At least it’s not an arm injury. Young pitchers never bounce back from arm injuries.” My father had survived a similar form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma less than six years earlier when I was a freshman in High School. Thanks to luck, his doctors, and newly developed treatment techniques, he beat the disease. And the only reason he beat it is because people who would never meet him cared enough to raise the money for the research that developed the techniques that saved his life.

That’s why I’m on this ride. Because it is clear that cancer can be beat. We have already made such amazing strides, but there is so much to do. For every story like my Dad’s, there's one with a very different ending, an ending that with enough effort, time, and money, hopefully we can change. This ride is my way of doing my very small part in the monumental effort that unites people across our country and the globe with the hope that other people can experience the wonderful feeling I had watching on TV as Jon Lester returned from his bout with cancer to pitch a seven inning shutout in Fenway Park, with my Dad sitting right next me. I look at this as my tiny contribution to the huge that effort that hopefully some day in the future will make all forms of cancer less worrisome than an elbow injury.