Oncology

Stinky Ball

So what’s in a name, especially when the name is “Stinky Ball?”

It’s the name a 4-year-old boy gave to his dad’s tumor.

And now, it has even greater meaning--in fact, a positive one.

There are many cancers that get all the press, and all the money toward research: lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer especially; but then you have the orphan diseases—including cancers that rarely occur and so rarely get attention.

But one man is fighting to put the disease he’s battling—thymus cancer-- on the map.

“Every doctor I went to dismissed it from just being tired from work and my family.” At first, it was fatigue, then asthma. But finally doctors discovered Allan Blaustein’s tumor.

Allan has thymus cancer.

The thymus gland lies in the middle of the upper chest, under the breast bone. In children it produces and processes lymphocytes, especially T-lymphocytes that are white cells that protect us from outside invaders like viruses.
Over time, it shrivels to near nothing.
But, rarely, it can become cancerous in an adult.
“There was a tumor or there was a mass the size of roughly a lemon if not an orange in the middle of my chest between my heart and my lung. There are only five hundred of them diagnosed in the united states a year and there are a good number of physicians who offices I went into who had to look in their own medical books to look for where the thymus was,” says Allan.

And that was the problem: a lack of information for such an uncommon tumor.

“There is no textbook when it comes to thymus cancer. You visit one oncologist and they tell you to take one protocol and then you visit a second they tell you a second protocol.”

Allan found the best expert he could find, and his surgery and chemo are behind him; but today he is hardly watching and waiting to see what happens.


“You can either role over and play dead or you can be proactive. What Allan has been saying since they told him, again instead of rolling over he said bring it on, he is going to fight it. They just did this major surgery and he was half sedated, he said a year from now we are going to have this fundraiser and we are going to get the word out about it,” says Roni Blaustein, Allan’s wife.

Allan recounts of his son, “Mathew who was then three, and he saw me and I had scars that really looked like map quest directions to my own house, my son looked at it and I said Mathew what should this be called and he said…”

“Stinky ball.”

Out of the mouths of babes. Allan’s tumor was so named.
But it then became a double entendre--also the name of Allan’s fundraiser to help raise awareness first for thymus cancer, but eventually, for other cancers that don’t make the headlines.

It’s kind of like making lemons out of lemonade, taking the stink out of the stinky ball.

“It’s a celebration of life for our friends and family to really stop and smell the roses,” says Allan.

The stinky ball is being held on May 4th at the Copacabana in New York City.

Allan is trying to get 300 guests the first year.

Anyone who wants information on the event can go to http://www.stinkyball.org.

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