It was the summer of 2009 when D.J. Marshall began to notice a lump growing on the side of his neck. Everyone around him told him that it was probably just a sports related injury. After all, Marshall was an athletic kid playing defensive end on a team that had just won the Insight Bowl.

Marshall redshirted the year Kansas won the Insight Bowl. He was eager to finally play his first season at Kansas. Unfortunately, he only made it through one game.

During the 2009 season, he began to notice his weight dropping. He played at 240 pounds but all of a sudden found himself weighing as low as 215 pounds. Then other strange symptoms began to appear: He was getting bad night sweats and he noticed the lump on his neck getting bigger.

He was sent to Lawrence Memorial Hospital where doctors took a biopsy. Soon after he received a call that would change his life forever.

“It was the next day and I was driving at the intersection of 23rd and Iowa, driving back towards campus,” Marshall said. “It was the doctor and he said it’s lymphoma. It didn’t bother me at first because I wasn’t exactly sure what lymphoma was. He was basically like, ‘it’s cancer and if we don’t get it checked out real soon, it could be fatal.’”

The magnitude of what was just told to him on the phone didn’t really hit him until he got back to campus and talked to all the coaches. They tried to comfort him and let him know everything would be alright. Then, they apologized for the way they had been acting toward him.

“They were sorry for pushing me so hard because during the year I was the worst college scholarship athlete we had,” he said.

The coaches were hard on Marshall that season. His physical performance was down, his grades were suffering and the coaches thought it was because he had been going out and drinking and hanging out with girls. No one really had a clue what was really going on inside his body at the time.

After the phone call from his doctor and words of encouragement from his coaches, he finally broke down and cried. He knew life had now become less about football and more about surviving.

It was Liz Laboda at Lawrence Memorial Hospital who found the lymph. Marshall is lucky she found it when she did. It was nearly too late.

There are four stages of Hodgkin Lymphoma. Stage one is the least serious and stage four is the most serious. Letters are also included to describe the stage of cancer, mainly the letters A and B. Patients with symptoms such as fever, night sweats and weight loss are described with a B, those without with an A.

“I was 3-B, so I was on my way to be being fatal,” he said. “If I would have come six months later, it would have been non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which is terminal, so I could have died.”

Marshall had more than 50 tumors throughout his body. He began chemotherapy at the beginning of the spring 2010 semester.

“They were telling me that since I was a college athlete and the youngest person in their treatment facility that they were going to give me the hardest treatment because they felt like I could deal with it,” he said.

Marshall drove from Lawrence to Tulsa, Okla., every other week for one day of treatment and one day of tests for 12 weeks. His parents, Heather and David Marshall, live in Dallas, which made it possible for them to visit him at the Tulsa treatment center. However, Marshall’s father was normally the only parent that was able to make the trip, as his mother had to stay at home and look after Marshall’s three younger siblings.

The numerous four-hour drives to Tulsa was one of the hardest parts for Marshall. Most of the time he rode with a friend, but he occasionally had to make the drive to chemotherapy treatments by himself.

“That was really hard for me,” he said. “I was 19 at the time. I just felt like the road gives you a lot of time to think. You just think about everything that is going on around you and how your life could change in any second.”

Marshall ended up taking incompletes in his classes during the fall 2009 semester when he was first diagnosed with cancer. To make up for the lost time, he took 21 credit hours during the spring 2010 semester, in addition to attending, but not participating in, football practices. All of this was going on in the midst of his chemotherapy treatments in Tulsa.

Because he was gone so much, he became distant from the football program that was basically his life before the incident. He needed help from his friends.

“My team was there,” Marshall said. “But they were also going through their struggles transitioning to a new coaching staff and, for the most part, I don’t feel like they had the time to focus on me and focus on developing a relationship with a new coaching staff.”

Marshall struggled to find people to turn to that could offer him support during this difficult time in his life.

“At times there was only like one or two people I could talk to,” he said.

One of those people turned out to be sophomore offensive lineman Joe Semple. Marshall ended up moving in with Semple and they became best friends. Semple was one of the few people who was there for Marshall the whole time.

“When he’d come home from cancer (treatments), he wouldn’t be in the best of shape,” Semple said. “I just felt like I had to keep his spirits up and make him laugh the best I can and get his mind off the cancer and just be there for him to talk to about whatever he’s going through.”

Then one day at practice, Marshall met someone else that he could talk to. This person, Connor Olson, ended up being one of his biggest inspirations during this entire ordeal.

Olson was a student at Tonganoxie High School in Tonganoxie. He had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. One day he came to a Kansas football practice. Olson had played football when he was younger but now, with one leg amputated and struggling with the effects of a terminal cancer, all he wanted to do was play ball again and be around football players.

Marshall and Olson met at practice and there was an instant bond between the two. Besides the cancer, they had something else in common. Both Olson and Marshall wore many types of cancer bracelets. Marshall wears Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong bracelets, others from his parents and one that says “believe.” The two friends exchanged bracelets and every day Marshall looks at the one that Olson gave him that reads “Cure for Connor.”

Olson and Marshall maintained a friendship after they had met. They kept in contact through texts and phone calls, but eventually Olson began texting less and less. Marshall knew something was wrong. Olson had had a stroke and Marshall said he died a couple days after.

“Me talking to him, knowing that my life is on the line just like his was — I could not be here just like he isn’t,” Marshall said. “That was one of my main driving forces for me to come back, for people, to be an inspiration to people with cancer or people without cancer. “

Today, Marshall has the chance to be that inspiration. When chemo treatments became less severe, he knew he was getting better. He found out in August that he’s now cancer free.

“I feel like I came out a better person, a stronger person,” Marshall said. “I was always a very confident person but after I got diagnosed with that I feel like my confidence was stripped away from me and then as I’m coming back now I feel like rejuvenation.”

Football is once again becoming a huge part of his life. Marshall has gone from chemotherapy treatments last semester to being dropped right back into the grind of things this semester. He’s been attending meetings, class and practices; everything a healthy football player would do. The only exception is that he hasn’t been playing. He’s being slowly worked back into the physical aspect of the game. Two weeks ago Marshall only wore a helmet during practice. Last week he wore a helmet and shoulder pads. This week he’s in full pads and next week he will participate in his first full practice, less than a year removed from having cancer.

“It is really great to see a smile on his face; it is really good to see a young man who has had a lot of tough times get better,” coach Turner Gill said. “I am happy for him, but I am also happy for our football team as he continues to make progress.”

Thanks to the help of head trainer Murphy Grant and Marshall’s academic adviser Glenn Quick, he is slowly but surely moving back into a normal college football player lifestyle.

For Marshall however, his work with cancer isn’t complete. Now that he’s a survivor, he wants to help other people. He encourages anyone struggling with anything, cancer or otherwise, to reach out to him for support. He wants to use his experience to inspire people through troubles in their own life.

“People with cancer,” he said, “once you’re in the meat of it, when it’s like your fourth treatment and you can’t see the end of it, just know there’s an end and you can see death and you can beat death.”

— Edited by Tim Dwyer