“I don’t want people thinking, ‘I got cancer, I’m dead’ – (instead) ‘I got cancer, I’m bad.’ ”
Michael Lopez, 22, spent his early years in the small city of Long Branch, New Jersey. He grew up in a close-knit family before heading south to Orlando once the 9/11 terror attacks left his mother, Ana, jobless.
“We’ve always been very close,” Michael says of their relationship. “We grew up without a lot of money, but we made do.”
After graduating high school, Michael had plans to work toward a bachelor’s degree at the University of Central Florida.
He was supposed to graduate last spring but was forced to withdraw from his studies in September 2014 after a health scare turned bad.
“After summer 2014 classes were over,” he recalls, “I was really weak, and I had a sore throat for five weeks.”
But Michael, an avid runner and overall athlete, refused medicine until his body started shutting down.
“I finally stopped running, I stopped eating junk, and I noticed a lump in my neck,” he says.
Immediately, he started researching symptoms of throat cancer, and thanks to the magical curse of Google, had convinced himself that he was doomed.
When Michael went to Florida Hospital in Orlando, doctors immediately checked his hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. For someone his age, normal levels are somewhere between 14 to 18 grams per deciliter.
Michael’s hemoglobin was at a nearly fatal level of 3.7.
“If they sent me home, I would have died,” he recalls.
At that point, doctors performed a bone marrow biopsy, and cancer cells were detected throughout his entire body. He was diagnosed with acute myeloid lymphoma, or AML, a cancer in which the body makes abnormal blood cells. The five-year survival rate for AML is approximately 26%. However, that is dependent upon a variety of circumstances, especially a patient’s age.
Michael, who walked into the appointment thinking he would be diagnosed with throat cancer, wasn’t initially shocked when the dreaded “C” word was mentioned, but when his mother broke down in tears, reality started to set in.
He started chemotherapy immediately and continued the regimen for five months, until February 2015. In the midst of treatment, Michael suffered from severe complications, including a near-fatal infection.
“But four days later,” Michael says, “I was up and dancing.” I was ‘Dangerous,’ ” he says, referencing Michael Jackson’s 1991 smash hit. “ ‘Dangerous’ kept me going.”
Shortly thereafter, he was up, running, and, of course, dancing to the man who inspired him to stay light on his feet.
“I went back to school,” Michael says. “I took a cruise, I went to Vegas, I went skydiving and skiing. I lived my life until September 2016.”
That’s when he learned the cancer had returned.
Symptoms were similar to those Michael experienced the first go-around: headaches, sore throats and lack of energy.
A visit to the hospital initially signified that everything was fine, but Michael insisted on follow-up bloodwork – and that’s when it was confirmed that he had relapsed.
Last September, Michael resumed a chemotherapy regimen, and unfortunately, caught MRSA, a dangerous staph infection, the day before Thanksgiving.
He’s been in the hospital since Feb. 7 awaiting a stem-cell transplant, which he underwent last week. Prior to the operation, Michael was given extremely high doses of chemotherapy to prepare his body – and he danced his way through all of it.
Coming from Michael’s hospital room, one of two sounds could – and can – be heard at any given moment: laughs with his girlfriend, Annie, and a constant stream of music from “the man.”
“Michael Jackson,” he says, “is just a good person. Good music, smooth dancing … he’s the man. His attitude … he had a passion for helping others and he donated so much to charity.”
“I’m standing right now dancing,” Michael says just a couple days before his stem-cell transplant. “I dance in Starbucks, even a little 1-2 step. I love older music – Diana Ross, Cool and the Gang, Jodeci, Salt n Pepa.”
Michael loves this music so much that he recently started posting videos to Facebook, featuring smooth moves to the King of Pop’s tunes while attached to the pole administering his chemotherapy (see above). The world is starting to catch on, with video views reaching well into the thousands.
Although the reaction wasn’t expected, it’s a very welcome surprise, and Michael hopes to change the world
“I started doing these dancing videos because of the way cancer is portrayed,” he explains.
“It’s like, ‘You’ve got cancer, and you’re automatically dead.’ But I do sit-ups, push-ups … I wanted to show others that cancer isn’t always a death sentence. You never associate it with a happy moment. You put it to the side, to be strong. When you tell people you have cancer, they get scared. I want people to look up cancer on Facebook and come across my videos, see something happy. I wasn’t expecting it to go viral.”
But now that it has, Michael has major plans.
“I’m in touch with the Dream Foundation and I want the license to the song ‘Bad’ to re-enact the video with cancer patients of all ages. No matter what you go through, no matter what you got … you’re still here, you’re still bad. Show them what you got.”
Michael’s trying to build a sense of community and eventually hopes to get “response videos” from hospitals around the world.
“My main goal is to help people and change perception,” he explains. “I did the stem-cell transplant because it increases my chances of survival, but I mainly did it because of this project I want to do – I want to inspire people.”
In addition to challenging common perceptions about cancer patients, Michael also wants to inspire people to see life a little differently, appreciating the small things that often get taken for granted.
“You can always get another job, for example, but you can only get one life,” he explains. “Some people have a week or a month to live – if they can be positive and dance, I can dance, too. I want to speak to everybody … I want people of all ages to be dancing.
“I don’t want people thinking, ‘I got cancer, I’m dead’ – ‘I got cancer, I’m bad.’ ”
SOURCE: The Advertiser
