Teacher, baseball player battles brain cancer again

WASILLA — More than seven years after ridding his brain of oligodendroglioma, a tumor that can cause seizures, headaches and personality changes, substitute teacher and baseball player Jeremy Wedge finds himself dealing with a whole different ball game.

On June 10, 2014, Wedge experienced a grand mal seizure while in Oregon.

“I was unsure for a while what it was,” Wedge said in an interview Wednesday.

Wedge had an MRI shortly thereafter, but doctors noticed nothing unusual. He was told he couldn’t drive because of the seizure — in accordance with Alaska Administrative Code 90.440 — and returned to Alaska to play for the Anchorage Adult Baseball League.

But then something else happened. Wedge, his wife Ashley, and his teammates started to notice a change in his personality.

“I started getting frustrated easier,” he said. “I started getting angry and vulgar, and I don’t believe cussing or anything like that’s gonna solve anything … but I started doing that continuously.”

Wedge began to loudly complain about calls out on the field, and his coaches “were kind of confused” about what was going on with their pitcher, he said.

“I was conscious of what was going on, I just couldn’t stop it,” Wedge said.

He even went so far as to print off the league regulations, hand them to the umpire, and tell the umpire he was wrong and “should no longer umpire in our league,” he said.

Finally, in one game, Wedge’s coach went out to the pitching mound to ask him how his arm was feeling, and what he said next didn’t make any sense.

“I started talking about the sun and the weather,” Wedge said.

His coach left, bewildered. Later, Wedge didn’t even remember what he had said.

“I remember talking to him, but I don’t remember talking about the sun. I remember saying ‘oh my arm’s feeling fine,’” he said.

That’s when the Wedge family knew something was wrong.

In the first week of October last year, Wedge was diagnosed with grade-4 glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor.

Shortly thereafter, doctors were actually able to remove 100 percent of the primary tumor on the left side of his brain, but a secondary tumor was lurking unseen.

“They didn’t notice anything ’cause they just looked at the previous MRI and just thought it was, you know, effects from radiation,” Wedge said.

Wedge’s wife said the doctors thought the dark spots in and around Wedge’s old tumor bed were simply scar tissue from previous surgery, performed several years ago.

Wedge was diagnosed with oligodendroglioma the day after his 22nd birthday. He was pursuing his bachelor’s degree in history at Minot State University in North Dakota at the time and made frequent trips to Seattle for treatment and the surgical removal of the tumor.

Three months after his diagnosis, Wedge was tumor-free. He continued treatment for a year, the doctors took him off all anti-seizure medication, and he went on with his life.

“I thought it was gone,” Wedge said, of the cancer.

Now, Wedge is 30 years old. He and his wife have a 3-year-old daughter and another child due this week. He’s still working on a master’s degree in special education.

And he has to travel to Seattle every two months and to Texas every six months for specialized treatment and research regarding the effects of new technology by Novocure on his tumor, since they can’t surgically remove it.

“It’s a tumor that’s like a cloud, so they can’t just, you know, cut it out, because it’s spread across my brain,” Wedge said.

The Novocure technology is “just barely out of clinical trials,” his wife said, and uses alternating electrical fields to stop cell division in the brain so the tumor can’t grow. It also has the power to kill cells before they divide, potentially shrinking the tumor.

To that end, the doctors and the Wedge family have seen some success. Wedge also has a lesion on his brain stem, and with the Novocure package he has to wear “all day every day,” his wife said, they’ve begun to see some shrinkage of both the cloud and the lesion.

“We’re making a little progress,” she said.

Wedge has also been taking an “herbal cocktail” developed by his father through personal research of alternative medicines all over the world.

“Just because the FDA does not approve it does not mean that it’s not going to help,” Wedge said.

If there’s a chance a method or medicine will kill the cancer, he said, he’s willing to give it a shot.

“You’ve gotta try anything and everything to be able to beat it, and if you don’t have that attitude and if you don’t have a positive view about life, you are going to beat yourself,” he said.

Wedge’s parents are organizing a spaghetti feed and silent auction fundraiser from 4:30 to 7 p.m., March 21, at the Palmer Moose Lodge to support the family in the coming months as Jeremy continues treatment and Ashley takes maternity leave from her teaching position at Wasilla High School.

“Thoughts and prayers” are also welcome, Wedge said.

For more information about the fundraiser, contact Cathy at Trinity Lutheran Church at 745-0726.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.

A spaghetti feed and silent auction fundraiser to benefit the Wedge family is planned from 4:30 to 7 p.m., March 21 at the Palmer Moose Lodge.