A coach who knows how to fight Friday, December 16, 2011 By Cody Broder During the first week of the 2011 wrestling season, coach Jason Branigan and his younger brother Jon demonstrate techniques for PL South athletes. The coach has been involved in wrestling since age 7, when his dad helped create what is today called the Monarch Wrestling Club. - Photo courtesy of Antone Oseka of Papillion Times Advertising At 17, Jason Branigan was a normal teenager, competing as an athlete for the Papillion-La Vista High School Monarchs and hanging out with friends. He wrestled and played baseball, basketball and football. “I did about anything and everything you could imagine,” the PL South wrestling coach and social-studies teacher said. Branigan grew up the oldest of three boys and two girls in what he called an “active home.” He was first introduced to wrestling at age 7, when his dad and other men from the community revitalized the local wrestling club. “It was just natural to go with him,” Branigan said. The time spent around wrestling had an effect. “Slowly but surely I started liking it more and more,” Branigan said, adding that if his dad had not taken an interest in the sport, his story probably would be different. At age 11, Branigan had the revelation that wrestling could be part of his future. His parents excused him from a day of school so that he could compete in a youth championship in Kearney. “I ended up being the 11-year-old state champ. I was 105 pounds,” Branigan said. “I think at that point in time I knew I could probably be somebody.” He went on to become a state champion wrestler in his sophomore and junior years of high school, along with being an All-State linebacker on the football team his junior and senior years. He credited his success to great coaches and determination. “I was blessed with some talent, but yet at the same time it seemed like I had to work so hard for what I saw other people just doing naturally,” he said. Some of Branigan’s biggest worries at the time were homework and performing well at sports practices. Then, in the final home football game of his senior year, Branigan collided head-on with an opposing running back. He said the rest of that night was a blur. The next morning, he woke up with vertigo. “The world was just spinning,” he said. “Everything went round and round and round. ... The only thing you could do was close your eyes.” He said he crawled up the stairs and yellled for his mother. She called an ambulance, which transported him to Midlands Hospital, but he was immediately transferred to Children’s Hospital. This was not an ordinary concussion; the collision on the football field had unleashed a deadly monster that had been lurking inside Branigan’s body. On Nov. 1, 1991, the recently crowned Homecoming king and star athlete was diagnosed with choriocarcinoma, a highly malignant form of testicular cancer. “Doctors said that we caught this cancer in time. Yet at the same time, as ironic as it was, that cancer had spread from my testicle up into my chest, up into my head and into my brain. So ‘catching it in time’ was kind of an oxymoron,” Branigan said. When Branigan received the news, he accepted it as something he would have to overcome. “I looked at [the diagnosis] as just another match or just another football game -- make another tackle, or whatever -- because I was young and naive. I really didn’t know the full-fledged cancer that was there ... how bad it really was,” he said. His parents did not tell him at the time that doctors said he probably had only a month and a half to live. “I was a senior in high school, 17, and that wasn’t something that they were going to tell me,” he said. “Quite honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered. If anything, it would have strengthened my resolve.” The young man outlived the odds. The new year arrived and so did his 18th birthday, on Jan. 11. “When the 11th rolled around and I was still alive, then they were really kicking that party off,” Branigan remembered. Over the course of his treatment, doctors removed the source of his cancer and tumors in his brain. Just as they thought he was “good to go,” as Branigan put it, X-rays revealed more than 200 tumors in his chest. It took four cycles of chemotherapy to eliminate those. The treatment did its own damage, robbing Branigan’s body of essential platelets and red and white blood cells. “It’s a great drug, but it’s a bad drug,” he said. “It killed a lot... I had to boost back up so I could get torn down again.” After the chest tumors were gone, doctors informed him that two tumors in his left lung made it necessary to remove one-third of that organ. His body couldn’t take much more. He suffered a heart attack and a serious viral infection. “I got to a point where it was between chemotherapy cycles and I was feeling OK,” Branigan said, “but then you are very susceptible at that point in time to anything and everything.” When Branigan overcame those setbacks, his brain surgeon suggested radiation therapy to prevent the cancer from returning. Branigan, who had gone back to school by then, scheduled treatments around his classes. Throughout his ordeal, Branigan received support that he said kept him moving forward. “I have a box at home full of letters from people from all over the country to me that said, ‘Hey, we’re praying for you,’ or this or that or whatever it might be. Talk about touching. That was just amazing,” he said, adding: “It would have been tough to fail all those people and not have a positive outlook and try to be upbeat.” Classmates at the old high school hosted pancake feeds and fundraisers, as well as holding up signs in his honor at Monarch sporting events. Before one of his surgeries, he was told nearly half the school had shown up at the hospital to support him. “I had a lot of friends,” Branigan said, “but I didn’t realize how many I had until that happened.” Throughout his treatment and recovery, Branigan tried to support his teammates as well. He remembers sitting at the very top of Lincoln’s Devaney Center, hooked up to an IV drip on a pole, watching his friends on the wrestling team compete in a tournament. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, I could still get out there,’” he said with a smirk. Doctors told Branigan he would never compete in any sport again, but his competitive instinct took over. “Of course I took that with a grain of salt and said, ‘Whatever,’” Branigan recalled. “I started training again, and [Nebraska Wrestling Coach Tim] Neumann had said, ‘Hey, Branigan, if you want to come back, I’ve got a scholarship waiting for you.’ But, at the same time, I think somewhere deep down I knew that that would probably not happen.” Branigan signed up to wrestle at the Cornhusker State Games and practiced without his mother’s knowledge. The day of the event, she caught wind of the situation and told him he could not compete. “The next thing I know, I’m on the phone with a doctor,” Branigan said. “She had called one of my oncologists. He got on the phone: ‘Branigan, you’re not wrestling. You’re done.’” “That was a reality check,” he said. Before his diagnosis, Branigan was being recruited to play football or wrestle for colleges across the country, including Notre Dame, Washington, schools in Kansas and Iowa and his dream school: UNL. Despite having been in and out of the hospital for seven months, Branigan managed to graduate with the Papillion-La Vista High School Class of 1992. Unable to compete, he turned his energy toward becoming a teacher and coach. He has worked at PL South since the school opened in 2003. In the meantime, he became a husband and father -- something doctors at one point suggested might be impossible. In reflecting on his life’s path, Branigan said he took nothing for granted. “As much as you want to put into your extracurricular work and stuff like that, it’s not as important as your family and friends and the man upstairs,” he said. Although he now has few physical side effects as a result of his bout with cancer, he said it affected him in other ways. “There are a lot of times during the day where I will stop and say, ‘Thank you. I’m alive.’” His hope is to use his experiences to help young people focus on what matters. “Once you get something like [cancer] when you’re that young, you look at life a whole lot differently,” he said. The cancer that was expected to end Branigan’s life has been in remission for nearly 20 years. “I know without a shadow of a doubt that there was a miracle there,” the coach said, “because I wasn’t supposed to be here.”

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