How Cody Stahmer fought a secret battle with cancer and won

November 16, 2014

By Brendan Kurie, South Coast Today

On a deceptively ordinary October night in 2012, the Stahmer family sat around the dining room table, a copy of a newspaper laid open to a story describing a catch made by Cody, the oldest of Nichole Stahmer’s three kids, in a Vikings football game the night before.

The story described Cody coming off the darkened bench onto the fluorescent-tinted field to make two touchdown grabs while leading Wareham to victory.

“It made him sound like he was Batman coming in from the night,” Nichole says. “It was like a superhero.”

And thus Cody Stahmer earned a nickname reserved for those closest to him, one that friends and family soon began using on Facebook: “The Dark Knight.”

Within 18 months, his weekly chemo sessions were called his “Superhero serum.”

AN ATHLETIC JOURNEY

Cody Stahmer never called anywhere except Wareham home until he went off to college in the fall of 2013.

His father, Joseph, is a construction worker and truck driver with five kids. His mother, Nichole, raised Cody and his younger sister and brother — the older two are half siblings — while working two jobs, spending her days as a physical education teacher at Wareham Middle School and her nights bartending.

“From the day he was born,” Nichole says, “I wanted to be a better person for him.”

Since he could walk, Cody has competed in sports. Early on, it was soccer, then BMX racing. When he was 7, he started playing basketball and baseball, but because of when his birthday fell, he was often the youngest, and always the scrawniest, on the team. Football quickly became his passion.

“I liked it right away,” Cody says. “Sometimes it was tough being a younger kid on the squad, but I loved it and I stuck with it.”

A tall, skinny kid — he now stands 6-foot-3 and has built his weight back up to 180 pounds — with obvious athleticism, youth coaches weren’t sure where to play Cody. He moved from quarterback to defensive end to tight end to safety. By the time he reached Wareham High School, he was quarterbacking the freshman team. But midway through his sophomore campaign, while playing for the JV squad, he made his final transition, migrating to wide receiver and the defensive backfield.

“I kind of knew with my height and speed I shouldn’t be at quarterback,” Cody says. “I knew in my mind I had the height and speed we really needed at wide receiver.”

As a junior, Cody was relegated to playing cornerback. Finally, his senior year, he lined up out wide and immediately went to work, catching three-quarters of the Vikings’ passes and finishing with 348 yards and five touchdowns, earning him All-South Coast Conference and Standard-Times Super Team honors.

“He runs really good routes and he tracks the ball real well,” Wareham head coach Dan Nault said after Cody’s senior season, during which the Vikings went 9-2. “When you’re in third-and-long and have no choice but to throw, he’s the choice.”

Meanwhile, at Mass. Maritime Academy, Cody’s close friend, E.J. Bennett, was a sophomore wide receiver who wouldn’t keep quiet about his lanky former Vikings teammate.

“E.J. turned us on to him,” Buccaneers head coach Jeremy Cameron says. “(Cody)’s got good size and he’s deceivingly fast because he has tremendous strides. You look up and he’s constantly getting by people.”

By October of 2013, Cody was every bit an average Division III football player. He hadn’t suited up as a freshman, which he admits was tough, but he’d practiced hard all fall. He was adjusting to life on campus. His Facebook feed featured requests for a mini-fridge. His Twitter account spoke of Paul Pierce and MTV. His Instagram was filled with photos taken with his 2-year-old pitbull, Chief.

Then, he noticed a lump.

DEALING WITH REALITY

After a visit to the doctor in October, he was sent to a specialist, then to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in December. He was diagnosed with seminoma, a form of testicular cancer most commonly found in men age 15-35 which, if there was any solace to take, carries a 95 percent survival rate, according to the National Institute of Health.

“I thought my life was going to end,” Nichole says. “You never think it’s going to happen to you. I couldn’t even think to live a day of my life without him. There really were no words.”

Soon the chemo began. Cody moved out of his dorm and back home. His family, often his sister Maddison, would drive him up to Dana-Farber, leaving before 5 a.m., where he would undergo treatment before returning to Wareham at 8 or 9 at night. He could have stayed overnight, but that would mean he lived in a hospital. And hospitals weren’t where Cody belonged.

“It was very stressful for me,” Cody says. “I wasn’t a fan of IVs or needles at all, and putting IVs in my veins was not easy for the doctors. That was one of the toughest parts. The chemo made me feel super week. It changes everything.”

Cody would come home and bundle down with Chief, sleeping away half the day in his weakened state. He kept his treatment a secret to all but his closest family and friends. Many of his Buccaneers teammates didn't know until this fall.

“He was almost in denial, I think,” Nichole says. “He was like, ‘This isn’t happening.’ Cody has always been the strength out of the family. He’s always been a pretty strong kid.”

His coach started hearing a few rumors about Cody having health issues and approached his lanky wide receiver.

“I just went to him and said I heard this through the grapevine and asked if there’s anything I could do,” Cameron says. “He hasn’t asked for any help. He’s just done everything that everyone else does without a hiccup.”

Try as Cody might, his spiraling health soon became impossible to hide. For the first few weeks he didn’t lose his hair, but then it started coming out in clumps. His weight loss turned dramatic.

“He almost went back to infancy,” Nichole says. “You don’t want to see your grown child with no hair and so frail. His skin color was the wrong color. He would just crawl home.”

As he drew closer to his family, Cody kept his silence around his football brethren. Other than a few choice teammates, including E.J., they were in the dark as May’s spring practices arrived and Cody returned to the field, just weeks after completing his last round of chemo.

“He had noticeably lost some weight and when you watched him play he obviously didn’t have his cardio up to speed,” Cameron says.

Cody could tell the strains of fighting cancer had ravaged his young body.

“I felt clumsy at times, very weak,” he says. “Running was very hard. My chest, I couldn’t breathe as well.”

In May he went in for a checkup and was greeted with the type of news every cancer patient hopes to hear, but also knows isn’t a concrete lifeline: Doctors proclaimed him cancer-free.

“It was heart-lifting,” he says. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure what I was going to hear. They said ‘You’re free.’”

So he set a goal. He gave himself one summer to accomplish it.

“I wanted to get back to where I was before,” he says. “I wanted to play football again. I wanted to play for Mass Maritime.”

BACK TO BASICS

Six days a week, all summer, after they got out of work, Cody and E.J. would head down to the Wareham YMCA to train. On the seventh day, they went for a run. He asked his mom to only prepare chicken breasts, fruits and vegetables for dinner.

“I couldn’t believe how quickly he got strong,” Nichole says. “He was very self-disciplined.”

E.J. and Cody became so close, with E.J. often staying for dinner with the Stahmers, that Nichole took to calling him “my fourth kid.”

“As much as he was helping Cody and motivating Cody, I think E.J. felt just as motivated by Cody,” Nichole says. “Wareham gets so much bad press, but here’s kids doing good stuff.”

By the end of the summer — which brought one more good-news visit at Dana-Farber during his three-month checkup — Cody was in the best shape of his life. He was back to his playing weight of 180 pounds and his quickness and agility had reconciled with his body.

“I was surprised how hard I worked and pushed myself,” he says now. “I didn’t realize how good I felt about myself until I realized I felt better than I did before I felt the cancer. Cancer was a real inspiration to me to get to that next level.”

That’s precisely what he did when he returned to the practice field in August.

“He hadn’t missed a beat, he looked better than ever,” Cameron says. “If you don’t come in in really good shape it’s hard to get through training camp. He was certainly in excellent shape.”

Cody was still deep down the depth chart behind E.J., who would set the school’s all-time receiving yardage record this season, but in a Week 3 loss to Worcester State on Sept. 27, less than a year after his diagnosis, Cody caught his first collegiate pass on an 11-yard hitch route.

His proudest moment in that game, though, came on a broken play.

The Buccaneers began the down by running the wrong play, but halfback Kenny Pierce still found a hole and broke it to the outside. Cody followed the play, eventually catching up and laying a block on the final would-be tackler to spring Pierce for a 69-yard touchdown.

“My biggest moment was making that block, it wasn’t catching the ball,” Cody says. “I didn’t think I’d get in that game. It was very exciting, a big moment for me.”

Up in the stands, Nichole cried.

“Even to see him in the uniform,” she says before pausing to compose herself, “There was a chance he wouldn’t have been there. I think for all of us, it makes us appreciate things and time in a different manner. It puts things in perspective and humbles you.”

A RETURN TO NORMALCY

Cody has been cancer-free for six months now. He still has to return to Dana-Farber every six months for check ups.

Mass Maritime wrapped up its 4-6 season with a 31-21 win over Bridgewater State in the annual Cranberry Bowl on Saturday. Cody didn’t catch another pass on the season, although he got on the field a few more times and nearly caught a deep bomb against Fitchburg State; he still feels he should have drawn a pass interference penalty on the play.

The team’s top three wide receivers, including E.J., were all seniors, giving Cody a chance to move into a more prominent role next year, something his coach is confident he can achieve.

“We expect him, next year, to be in the mix and contributing,” Cameron says. “He’s shown he wants to be a part of it. He works hard. He’s a really good kid. He just had a couple of guys ahead of him who were two or three year starters. He’s capable of doing it.”

For the past year, the doctors, nurses and patients at Dana-Farber have become a second family for Cody, one he could dare expose his vulnerability to while he maintaining his stoic front at school.

“It’s been a pretty hectic year,” Cody says. “It’s definitely made me think about life, see all the people I saw there. I would never think I would be going through something and seeing other people going through something worse. I realized I didn’t have it that bad. A lot of them were my inspiration.”

The nurses at Dana-Farber loved to call him “The Dark Knight,” and it soon spread. Cody’s sister had read that in Brazil, they put plastic covers over the chemo bags so patients don’t have to stare down their own debilitating medicine. So she ordered Batman stickers, and when the nurses brought a chemo bag, she would affix one to the side.

In the children’s hospital, the nurses loved the idea so much, Nichole says, they asked if they could share his stickers with the kids in the unit.

“He truly is my superhero,” Nichole says. “The world needs more Codys.”