From hospital to home plate, junior fights to make baseball comeback after battling tumor

The feeling of sharp stabbing needles in his back was a clear indication that something was wrong. Junior Kasen Brown needed to get help from professionals, and after going through tests locally, Brown was sent to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas after a tumor was discovered on his spine, near his pelvis.

“My parents took me into a separate room and told me privately,” Brown said. “I could tell something was wrong just by looking at the expressions on their faces.”

Although Brown’s sickness was non-cancerous, a tumor for anyone can be deadly. Brown described his sheer pain as something he had never felt before.

“It was a random pain,” he said. “Almost like needles sticking into my spine every time I walked anywhere. Soon enough it brought me a limp.”

Brown almost needed immediate surgery to have the racquetball ball-sized tumor removed. For most people, the thought of going into surgery for something as serious as a tumor can wreck a person’s mind mentally.

“I couldn’t think much,” he said. Nothing was going through my head when I heard I needed surgery.”

With that news, Brown knew his 2024 baseball season was going to be cut short, however, he continued to prepare for the season like he would any other time he played. Brown’s season opener ended up being just six days before his operation, and he, batted leadoff for the team.

“We knew coming in that it was going to be his last game of the season,” Assistant Coach Matt Renshaw said. “He worked hard in the offseason just like anyone else and he deserved to be out there with his teammates.”

In his first at-bat, Brown drew a four-pitch walk, followed by him scoring the first run in school history a batter later. During his second appearance at the plate, Brown hit a line drive to the left side in front of the opposing team’s left fielder. However, with the run rule put into play, Brown’s season was over after just two at-bats.

Three days following his final game, Brown traveled to the cancer center once more, this time, to remove his painful friend for good. On March 21, Brown underwent his surgery.

When he woke up, Brown received the news that the operation was successful. However, the long journey of getting back to where he once was had just begun. He ended up spending a total of three weeks in the intensive care unit in Houston where the nurses helped him relearn how to walk and learn how to move without injuring his back.

“The MD Anderson staff is great to work with,” Brown said. “They do things a majority of medical staffs can’t do. If a person only has a couple of months to live, they [the staff] add almost 10 more years to a patient’s life.”

Brown returned home in early April, and like many other injured athletes, Brown wanted to show support to his teammates.

“He was a teammate that picked up kids when they were down,” outfielder, junior Jensen Albers said. “He brought the most energy to the team even when he was hurting the most.”

However, Brown’s story would remain different. For most, traveling back and forth between Houston and Omaha as he and his family did, can affect the mental side of the recovery, but Brown claims it had “no effect.”

“I didn’t mind going back and forth to Houston,” he said. “You can look at it like, yes, it was a lot of traveling, but I knew it was going to make me better.”

With no physical therapy needed for the removal of the tumor, Brown and doctors played the waiting game. Little by little, Brown regained his strength, and after numerous trips back to Houston over the summer, Brown finally heard the words he had been waiting for from his doctors: “You may return to baseball.”

Upon returning home, Brown immediately began practicing baseball again, joining his teammates on the school baseball team for the program’s summer weight training and conditioning.

“I feel blessed to be able to practice and do more because of where the tumor originally was,” Brown said. “It could’ve caused me to be paralyzed and not be able to play the game again.”

With the tumor gone and no sign of it reappearing, Brown’s only focus through the offseason months is returning to his original form in hopes of taking the field competitively in March once again.