University of Michigan Sex Abuse Lawyers –
“These kids didn’t have a choice,” said Michael Wright, an attorney from the Wright and Schulte firm who has worked on large-scale sexual assault cases and says he has more than 125 former Michigan athletes signed on as clients. “A lot of these kids, this was their way out. They had to endure assaults. That was the only way they could play. A lot of them were too scared or intimidated. They knew this wasn’t comfortable or thought that it was wrong. They felt powerless, as most sexual assault victims do.”
Chuck and LaDonna Christian sat side by side in front of the relative stranger wearing a white lab coat. They had assumed they would be on their way home by now, waiting for a phone call to give them Chuck’s test results. Instead, the doctor had told them to stick around for a few extra minutes.
LaDonna, a professor of nursing with years of experience in the field, knew doctors don’t ask patients to wait for good news to be delivered in person. She laced her fingers around her husband’s large hand and squeezed. Chuck, then a 57-year-old former University of Michigan football player, knew it, too.
Warning signs had started to appear about a decade earlier. It wasn’t until LaDonna noticed Chuck making eight to 10 nightly trips to the bathroom that she put her foot down and demanded he see a doctor. He hated seeing doctors.
The doctor in front of them now explained that a healthy person’s prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels fall somewhere less than four nanograms per milliliter. Anywhere between four and 10 is suspicious, and anything in double digits is considered a very dangerous sign of cancer. Chuck’s levels were in the high 60s.
Chuck had screamed bloody murder during the prostate check that morning. The doctor said his gland was as hard as a rock. The numbers confirmed what the physical exam indicated: prostate cancer.
Had they caught it years ago, the doctor told them, it might have been fixed with a relatively routine procedure. But a biopsy showed that the cancerous cells had spread to Chuck’s lymph nodes, spine, ribs and shoulder. Chemotherapy could help fight the growth, but it wouldn’t provide a cure. Chuck had about three years left to live.
“Why didn’t you get this checked out?” LaDonna asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I just couldn’t go.”
The real answer would take years to emerge.
Read the rest of the ESPN original article here.
Watch the ESPN interview with Chuck Christian here.
