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Positive signs for Jake Burton's fight

Snowboard industry giant says it 'appears that my cancer is toast'

Updated: January 29, 2012, 6:43 PM ET
By Keith Hamm | ESPN Action Sports

Jake Burton, Donna CarpenterJesse Lirola/Getty ImagesJake Burton (shown with his wife, Donna Carpenter) released an update stating, "It appears that my cancer is toast."

In the span of just four months, snowboard industry giant Jake Burton and a team of oncologists have evidently turned the tables on a disease that threatened to take his life.

Back in September, the pioneering snowboarder released a memo to his worldwide employee base that started off, "The bad news is that I have cancer." But that ton-of-bricks opener was immediately followed by some relatively good news: "[It's] as curable as it gets."

What Burton faced was testicular cancer -- medically known as seminoma -- the same disease that cyclist Lance Armstrong battled and overcame. With early detection, the survival rate of affected men is greater than 95 percent. The average age of diagnosis is 40 years.

Burton, 57, began a three-month regimen of chemotherapy, a cellular-level treatment that often comes with severely debilitating side-effects. Earlier this month, he released an update stating, "It appears that my cancer is toast."

That doesn't mean, however, that Burton is in the clear and back on the mountain, approaching his typical 100-days-per-year snowboarding season. According to his memo, he's still facing possible radiation treatment and surgery down the road -- the removal of one or both testes is not uncommon -- and must stay on-point with periodic scans and observation. Still, he remains upbeat.

"I'm not stressing about it," he wrote, adding that oncologist Steve Ades told him, "Jake, you get your diploma."

"As I transition from being a patient to being a survivor," Burton said, "I move on with enormous respect for both cancer … and chemotherapy (how something so beneficial [can] be so simultaneously harmful). I am pretty much broken … I have a lot of healing to do. But when I look at role models like Lance Armstrong, I know I have no excuses."

Keith Hamm

Action Sports

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