Imaging devoting your entire life to mastery of the body through jiu-jitsu, the daily feeling of mats under your palms and sound of your friends and students around you. Then, imagine waking up unable to move from the waist down. The plastic beneath your palms is now hospital bedding under your body, and the sound of the school is replaced by beeping machines keeping sick people alive. That is the nightmare happening to black belt “Professor Jorge,” coach at Phenom BJJ. And it’s made even worse by the catastrophic expenses of the chemotherapy and medical equipment that is, right now anyway, essential to getting the coach into remission and back onto the mats.
As recently as June 2019, Phenom BJJ had Professor Jorge teaching, where they love him. But the coach was experiencing brutal lower back pain, tingling in his limbs, and odd sensations in his core which worsened for weeks. Two months ago Jorge collapsed and was rushed to the ER, where doctors found a tumor the size of a baseball on his spine.
Jorge was moved into emergency surgery, where it was discovered that aggressive B-Cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma is attacking his spine. The surgery to remove the tumor was successful, but that agonizing procedure was just the beginning of a very long, very expensive battle.
A GoFundMe for the fighter explains that:
“The aggressiveness of his cancer was the cause for his paralysis and in just a week after surgery, Jorge’s cancer treatment was accelerated and he is undergoing his first cycle of chemotherapy and radiation therapy to treat the lymphoma and reduce the tumors in his spine.
The news, speed, and reality of his cancer while shocking and overwhelming, we have no doubt he will push through. For those of you that know him, you know that he is more than a fighter, he is a survivor.
He is fighting to be back with us all on the mats and to prove that our hurdles in life, no matter how large, can’t knock us down if we have the mindset to keep moving forward and smile through the pain.”
If you don’t want to live in a world where a man loses his life because the cost of cancer treatment, medical equipment to assist his paralyzed body, and the expense of not being able to work is so overwhelming he can’t proceed with treatment, you know exactly what to do with this link that you should click now.
This is where the “community” part of “fight community” can really be most powerful, so lets do the things.
