Helping a Rower in Need: Student Athlete Battles Cancer Without Health Insurance

January 17, 2012

As the fall semester was winding down to the last few weeks of classes and rowing, Jake Bouwman was just another happy student athlete at Grand Valley State University.

Until he started feeling like “something wasn’t right.”

He thought at first that he had a hernia and went to his crew coach to pull himself out of the lineup for the final race of the fall. Then he went to the doctor to find out how soon he could be back.

And that’s when everything changed. It wasn’t a hernia. It was a very aggressive form of testicular cancer. He needed surgery.

“The doctor said, ‘There is no easy way to tell you this, but you have testicular cancer.’ I was really blown back by that,” Bouwman said. “And I just cried. It was so demoralizing. To hear that you were going to have surgery and that you may never have kids, you just don’t want to hear that. I was so shocked by it.”

If that wasn’t bad enough for a 20 year old college student just trying to get by, Bouwman did not have health insurance and he had no way to pay the medical bills that were coming.

That’s when he learned an important lesson about the rowing community. It takes care of its own.

The morning before his surgery, Bouwman, who rows for Great Valley and spent last summer rowing for the Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia, ran into Kirsten A. Bartels, the facility advisor for the rowing team.

“Jake is a really, really nice kid and the Wednesday the week before Thanksgiving I ran into him on campus and he said he needed to talk to me. He told me he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer and he was going in for surgery the next day. He didn’t know how to process it. Then he made this off-handed comment that he didn’t have health insurance,” Bartels said.

“He didn’t know how he was going to pay for anything. So I talked to a couple of members of the team and we decided we had to mobilize. He had enough to deal with that he didn’t need to try to face this huge debt alone.”

What followed was a campaign that saw the entire Michigan-based university band together and start a website to appeal for donations in Bouwman’s name.

They named it “JakeStrong” and since its inception, fellow students, facility and rowers from all over the United States and Canada have raised more than $10,000, half of the estimated cost of the initial treatment.

“All of Green Valley has really, really banded together to raise money for this kid and it’s really inspirational to see,” said Bartels. “But he’s got a long way to go. He had the surgery and they removed the tumor. They wanted to remove all of his lymph nodes and then decided not to.”

For Bouwman, having this kind of support has been uplifting.

“It’s good to know so any people care, the rowing community, all of Great Valley, all my advisors, my professors. Everyone was really understanding because everything was happening so fast.”

Bouwman is back in school now and back training with the hope of a return to rowing. But he is not out of the woods. There are signs that the cancer has spread and if that is the case, he will have to undergo a more extreme surgery and have all of his lymph nodes removed.

Not only would the bills soar if that were the case, Bouwman would be facing a long, difficult recovery that would last close to a year.

So the effort to support him continues. And the founders of JakeStrong want to keep the website up and running so that a “legacy” fund can be created at Great Valley in Bouwman’s name.

“It’s a hard thing for the rowers to do. They’re a club team and they have to raise money for themselves. But they banded together and they have done a phenomenal job. But it’s not just the rowers who have done this,” Bartels said.

 “He’s in a fraternity and they have helped out. And really, the entire campus community is trying to help.”

To learn how to contribute to the JakeStrong effort, interested donors can go to the Jake Strong Facebook page or go to http://www.giveforward.com/jakestrongfundraisingforjakesbattlewithcancer?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=fb_wall&utm_campaign=receipt.

Ed Moran, Photo courtesy of grandvalleyrowing.com

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