Jerrold Dash has lung cancer, but 80-pound barbells, not a disease, define the man.
Jerrold Dash has lung cancer, but 80-pound barbells, not a disease, define the man.
While waiting for a lung transplant, the chiseled 5-foot-11-inch former college football player and track athlete can be found lifting free weights during intense workouts at the Page Mill YMCA branch in Palo Alto.
"(Lung cancer) has changed the way I approach a lot of things, but the way I can deal with it is curl up in a ball and mope and cry or go on with my life. And that's what I choose to do," said the Lockheed Martin engineer, a lifelong nonsmoker who is living in a Mountain View apartment this holiday season 1,600 miles away from his family.
Dash's wife and two daughters are in Fort Worth, Texas, where the 33-year-old was diagnosed with lung cancer in February.
Eight branches in the Bay Area, including the Page Mill location, host special exercise programs for cancer patients designed by the Stanford University Medical Center, where Dash is on a transplant waiting list.
"Jerrold has been a great inspiration to the rest of the group," said Sha Foland, YMCA healthy lifestyles director. "He even contacted me prior to the start of the program (Living Strong, Living Well) to get a 'head start.' "
Due in part to Dash's athlete's mind-set and strength he gains during his workouts, doctors have said Dash is healthy enough to handle the stress of a transplant.
Doctors initially thought he had bronchitis or asthma, but inhalers and antibiotics failed to cure his coughing, night sweats and daily fatigue.
When a doctor finally told him that he had lung cancer - that cloudy nodules were slowly filling the bottom of his lungs - he said, "It hit me harder than any linebacker could have hit me."
In the months following the diagnosis, Dash said he has had to deal with the treatment and the stigma attached to lung cancer.
"I didn't hang around smoky places, so I really wasn't expecting it," he said.
About 10 percent of lung cancer patients never smoked, according to the American Cancer Society. They are the men and women, who, like Dash, defend themselves against both a disease and people's perceptions. Besides tobacco smoke, air pollution and airborne particles at work sites have been cited by the society as lung cancer risk factors.
An example of how the stigma impacts lung cancer patients can be found on Dash's blog, 2newlungs.blogspot.com, where he explains that he is not a smoker and never spent time in smoky places, such as bars. He also rails against secondhand smoke.
"I will probably always carry a chip on my shoulder with regards to smoking," he wrote in an e-mail to the Daily News. "I just wish people were more aware of the effects of the smoke that they emit, and I just don't want to breathe it in. I think a little anger is to be expected. I am only human."
Dash was raised in a military family stationed in Europe and various places in the United States during his youth, including Texas.
He finished high school in Durham, N.C., home of "Tobacco Road," when his father retired from the U.S. Air Force. After college at Winston-Salem University, he worked for R.J. Reynolds, the company that makes Camel cigarettes, helping patch computer systems ahead of the year 2000.
His career eventually brought him back to Texas, specifically Fort Worth, where he worked at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics as a staff systems engineer.
"In Texas, the air was real bad," he said. "In my truck, I could turn on the air conditioning and get the filtered air."
Dash moved to the Bay Area to wait for his transplant in August, leaving his daughters behind so they weren't uprooted from their home. He talks to them on the phone and communicates via a Web cam.
The undefined wait for new lungs has been tough on the engineer, who said, "I want a start-finish date and that's something that they can't provide."
So he works out. Calls his wife and daughters. Works on aeronautics projects through telecommuting. And waits for the call.
E-mail Aaron Claverie at aclaverie@dailynewsgroup.com.