Count it all joy, Part I: ASU WR Michael Jefferson II battles through father’s bout with cancer
November 20, 2019
Count It All Joy is a three-part series that unfolds the struggles of two Alabama State football players as their parents battle the life-threatening disease. These circumstances would hit these two players at a time when life is already hectic.
Clinging to the youth football championship trophy he had just won and the joy that comes with any victory, Eleven-year-old Michael Jefferson II (MJ) followed his mom through the front door of their home in Mobile, Ala.
MJ’s Cottage Hill Steelers had just beaten the Municipal Raiders 12-6 in the Youth Bowl. The ASU receiver was a champion, and he couldn’t wait to tell his dad when he got inside the house.
That day, MJ’s father, Michael Jefferson Sr., stayed home. He wasn’t feeling well.
After Constance Jefferson, MJ’s mom, put her key in the door and turned the knob to enter their home, fear stood in the threshold, greeting her and MJ and stealing any highs of triumph that came with MJ’s championship win.
There lying on the floor in writhing pain was Jefferson Sr.
“I remember him asking for help, and telling us to take him to the hospital,” MJ said. “I should have stayed at home. I shouldn’t have gone to the game.”
That was November of 2010, right before Thanksgiving, Jefferson Sr. said, earlier that year he had been diagnosed with leukemia. Jefferson Sr., at the age of 43, had just been released from UAB Hospital in Birmingham after undergoing chemo treatment and hadn’t been home long before he started having pains in his stomach.
“When they got home I was at the front door,” Jefferson Sr. said, “because I couldn’t call anybody. I couldn’t make it to the phone. “(MJ) walked through the door with the championship trophy, because they sent him home to me.”
The trophy was a gesture of good faith and a get-well-soon token for Jefferson Sr. that became lost in the present circumstance. Clostridium difficile colitis, a stomach infection, was crippling Jefferson Sr. and it was spreading into his colon. The infection had attacked his immune system.
“It was scary,” Constance said. “Especially when you don’t know what’s going on.”
Constance didn’t waste any time getting Jefferson Sr. to an emergency room, but because she brought him in and not paramedics, they sat there, time wasting, a dreadful situation nearing life-threatening status.
“Nobody seemed like they wanted to do anything,” Constance said. “And he’s throwing up right there, and they still weren’t doing anything.”
In response, the family left the hospital and took Jefferson Sr. to his mother’s house, who lived “right around the corner,” he said.
Once there, they laid him down, but his condition escalated.
“I went to my momma’s house, because they wouldn’t see me, and I was hurting so bad,” Jefferson said. “I just wanted to lay down, so we left the hospital.”
While Jefferson Sr. attempted to medicate his situation with rest, he said his mother told him he was “screaming and hollering in his sleep.” That was the final straw, so they called an ambulance.
“The ambulance rushed me to the hospital,” Jefferson Sr. said. “When they got me in the back, the doctor looked at me and said, ‘Who is your cancer doctor?’
“He said, ‘we have to get him in here right now, because your colon is about to pop, and if it pops there is nothing we can do for you.’”
During emergency surgery, doctors took out Jefferson Sr.’s large intestine, but that wasn’t the only thing he lost that day. Before he even got onto an operating table and as doctor’s walked him through what procedures he would need, Jefferson Sr. temporarily lost the will to live.
“I told the doctors I had lived all my life ‘just give me some medication and let me go to sleep,’ and (MJ) heard it,” Jefferson said.
This shook MJ to his core. He ran into the hallway and started sobbing, Jefferson Sr. said.
“I was just scared that I wasn’t going to have a father growing up,” MJ said. “Because he said he had ‘lived long enough’ and that he was ‘tired of dealing with this pain.’”
But at his age, MJ displayed a strength that would prepare him for future trials. When the surgery ended and doctors entered his hospital room to inform Constance on what the next steps would be, Jefferson Sr. said MJ turned to the doctors and said “don’t talk to her talk to me, because I’m going to be the one to take care of him.”
And he did.
“He waited on me hand-and-foot for three months,” Jefferson Sr. said. “Would not go outside. He would go to school, come home, and the first thing he would do is come in the room where I was at and say ‘Daddy what do you need? What do you want me to do?
“That’s the bond we had.”
But when Jefferson Sr. had to tell MJ that cancer was back in February of 2019, he wasn’t sure if MJ could display the same strength he did in 2010.
February 2019, Jefferson Sr. was visiting his oldest daughter Tamika in New York for her baby shower, when doctors called and told him he needed to return home as soon as he could.
Prior to his visit, Jefferson Sr, went to the doctor for a check up because he had been under the weather. The doctor’s called with results from the visit, and after running some tests, they said there was cause for concern.
It was a Thursday, and the baby shower wasn’t until Saturday. So, it wasn’t possible for him to return. He wasn’t going to miss that. His flight was scheduled to come back the following Tuesday, and as soon as he got home, he met with his doctors to run more tests.
By Feb.12, doctors sent Jefferson Sr. back to UAB Hospital in Birmingham, where he stayed in their care until the first week of September.
Jefferson Sr., 51, put it as plainly as he possibly could: “I didn’t even know cancer came back.”
All throughout 2018, Jefferson Sr. was sick: fatigue, profuse sweating, and strong stomach pains. He knew he was sick but didn’t figure it was cancer again, so he let the sickness “persist,” he said. He continued to go to work, didn’t complain, and definitely didn’t go to the doctor.
It wasn’t until the new year that Jefferson Sr. decided to see the doctor, and the tests that were run in February revealed he had stage 2 leukemia, but this time it was “a different strand, and a much stronger, potent strand of leukemia,” he said.
But Jefferson faced another problem: delivering the news to MJ.
At this point in time in MJ’s life, a lot was going on. He was just coming off a freshman season with the Hornets where he didn’t feel like he was being utilized enough, a revamped coaching staff was on the horizon, and his car, a Monte Carlo SS fully loaded, had recently been stolen, along with some valuables that were in the vehicle.
“He hated Montgomery,” teammate Jeremiah Hixon said. “He didn’t want to be here. But I told Mike ‘I promise Mike, you’re going to be a star. It’s going to get better.”
He wanted to leave, transfer schools. Everything in his life was up for consideration. He was at a crossroads of sorts.
So, Jefferson Sr. and Constance thought it was necessary to call MJ home and break the news to him. Considering all he had been through recently, his parents figured they needed to be face-to-face with him, Jefferson Sr. said.
“I need to tell you what’s going on with me,” Jefferson Sr. told MJ at their home in Mobile. “They detected cancer again.
“You could see his whole face drop. I had to pause for a good little while, because I didn’t know where to go from there.”
But the next thing to come out of Jefferson Sr.’s mouth was a request. He insisted that MJ stay in school and get his degree. He didn’t want MJ to leave ASU in pursuit of taking care of him, dropping everything else for the sake of his father like MJ did when he was 11.
“When I found out I wasn’t too worried,” MJ said, “because he told me, ‘I’m a strong man, I can handle it, I can come through it.’”
The worry that did exist was overshadowed by a call to duty, the same call he felt when he was 11, because his father is “my everything, my backbone,” he said,
Figuring out how he would fulfill this sense of duty was bemusing to MJ. He couldn’t conceptualize how his family would support themselves with his dad being out of work because of the sickness.
There was no way it could all fall back on his mom, and at the time his brother, Antonio, was in jail, so there was no one at home to fill the shoes Jefferson Sr. manned.
There were so many questions, and MJ considered coming home for good.
“I was really puzzled because I was wondering about my mom and my brother,” MJ said. “I was wondering like, ‘What can me and my brother do?’ My brother is locked up, and he doesn’t get out until the end of this year. So, I wondered, ‘How much time do we have?’”
But his father insisted he stay in school. If anything, this was his only wish.
“I told him, ‘MJ you have to finish school,’” Jefferson Sr. said. “I didn’t want him to go backward.”
That was all it took. For MJ, respecting his father’s wishes is a top priority, always has been. The reverence and respect he has for his dad is indescribable, he expressed and in this situation he would do anything he could to make his father happy, and then some.
According to Jefferson Sr., MJ returned to school and took everything he was involved in the next level. His performance on the field and in the classroom, the way he carried himself, the posture of his spirit all changed because he wanted to make his father happy. He saw this as his own contribution to help improve his father’s health, he said.
But that was a given for MJ, so he took it one step further. Still concerned about the monetary situation at home, MJ would send home whatever refund check he received from the school.
“The sum I can give, I give to my momma to help pay whatever she has to pay,” MJ said. It was against his parents’ wishes, but he said it was his obligation.
“When he has bad days, he feels like I’m the only one that can cheer him up,” MJ said. “When I have good games or make good grades, that’s all he’s talking about, because some days he feels like giving up, and I’ll be his star. I make him want to keep pushing.”
Any day MJ knows his father’s health could turn, as Jefferson II waits for his body to accept new stem cells he received from his brother Eric in May through a bone marrow transplant. Until then, any call from home could be reflective of the one he received earlier this year.
Michael Jefferson (MJ) and his father’s story is part two of the three-part series “Count it All Joy,” which continues Wednesday with Jefferson’s teammate, Darius King and the trials of his mother, Katrice.
Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Andre Toran at 334-322-4631 or
