EKU’s A.W. Hamilton hopes he has beaten cancer. Now, he has a plan to save others.
On June 30, A.W. Hamilton did something he never does. When his cell phone buzzed, he saw a number he did not recognize yet answered the call anyway.
The Eastern Kentucky University men’s basketball coach had gathered EKU assistant Mike Allen and team manager Blake Harris into his Ford F-150 pickup to go to lunch.
The trio were headed to the Olive Garden in Richmond when Hamilton took the call that turned out to be Lexington dermatologist Dr. Fernando deCastro.
Only days before, deCastro had removed a mole from Hamilton’s right ear. Now the doctor was calling to report what he’d found.
Even when driving, college basketball coaches tend to be on the phone so Hamilton had his truck’s Bluetooth technology activated.
That meant all three passengers heard the doctor say the words that rocked Hamilton’s world.
“He said he was surprised and shocked (by) what they found,” Hamilton says, “then I blacked out. I listened to him but didn’t hear him.”
Allen and Harris sure heard. They listened in real time as the news was shared that their boss, fit and energetic at age 39, had been diagnosed with “at least” Stage II melanoma.
A.W. Hamilton had cancer.
“It was crazy,” Allen says. “We were just going for lunch.”
A stroke and a physical
The medical misfortune of a friend might have saved Hamilton’s life.
On June 12, EKU assistant coach Steve Lepore went home for lunch so he could spend time with his then-pregnant wife, Carrie.
Lepore, 40, got to feeling weird, laid down and then realized he had no sensation in his right arm.
He was having a stroke.
As basketball teammates at Wake Forest in the early seasons of this century, Lepore and Hamilton became best friends.
They are now brothers-in-law; Carrie Lepore is Hamilton’s younger sister.
That Steve Lepore — a physical fitness buff and an ardently healthy eater — could end up in the hospital after a stroke forced a reckoning on Hamilton.
The EKU head coach had not undergone a comprehensive physical exam since before the start of the 2004-05 college basketball season, his senior year playing for Marshall (where he had transferred from Wake Forest).
Now, stunned by Lepore’s stroke, Hamilton called his family’s physician, Dr. Todd Reinhart in Georgetown, to schedule a physical.
About a week later, near the end of that examination, Hamilton mentioned to Reinhart that he had a mole on the back of his right ear.
Reinhart insisted Hamilton see a dermatologist about the mole.
“I am not going to lie: If (the stroke) didn’t happen with Steve (Lepore), I would not have gone and got a physical,” Hamilton says. “That’s why I say Steve having that stroke, it might have saved my life.”
‘Very sad and scary’
According to the Mayo Clinic website, melanoma is considered “the most serious type of skin cancer.” The diagnosis was keenly haunting for Hamilton.
Earlier in his life, a cousin, Drew Hamilton, had died at age 13 after contracting melanoma.
After A.W. Hamilton’s melanoma diagnosis, his care was turned over to Dr. Joseph Valentino at the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center.
Chelsea Hamilton says the doctor was blunt with her husband.
“Dr. Valentino told A.W., ‘I don’t know what is going to happen to you,’” she says. “There were no answers until they got in there (via surgery). He’s not going to promise us something.”
That uncertainty ate at A.W. Hamilton.
The thought that he might not live long enough to see his daughters, Charleigh, 6, and Andi, 4, get married tormented him. So did the fear that he might not get to teach his son Archie, 1, how to play basketball.
Chelsea Hamilton says she realized how frightened A.W. was when “he told me one time — and this is super personal — ‘I can’t even look at the kids.’
“He’s Mr. Positive all the time (normally). So watching him kind of withdraw and be super negative, actually, was very sad and scary,” says Chelsea, the head coach of EKU’s all-girl cheerleading squad.
A.W. Hamilton says his mother, Deni Hamilton, helped him regain his footing.
“I called her and I was going through all these (negative) things: ‘What if I have to do chemo? What if I may not make it?’” he says. “My mom’s always been my voice of reason. She just said, ‘Listen, (this) doesn’t mean your battle is not going to be tough, but I genuinely believe God has a bigger plan for you.’”
It was then, Hamilton says, he realized he had to overcome negative thoughts if he was going to find a way forward.
A goal-setter since his days playing high school hoops for Billy Hicks on Scott County’s 1998 state championship team, Hamilton came up with a new set of aspirations:
1.) Beat cancer;
2.) Tell my story;
3.) Save someone else’s life.
‘It was amazing’
On July 14, Hamilton underwent a nearly four-hour surgery at UK. Valentino removed a cancerous tumor from Hamilton’s right ear and through an incision, took lymph nodes from his neck.
When Hamilton got home from his surgery, his appearance — a four-inch scar on his neck; a muff protecting his damaged ear — shocked his children.
“We didn’t tell them (about the cancer diagnosis beforehand),” Chelsea Hamilton says. “I haven’t decided if that was a great idea or not.”
Ten days after the operation, Valentino shared with Hamilton the verdict gleaned from the surgery. The doctor, Hamilton reports, said “’it appears we got everything. There were no cancer cells in your lymph nodes.’”
“That,” Hamilton says, “was amazing. It was amazing.”
Though cancer-free, Hamilton is not as he was before the surgery.
His hearing is fine, but he does not have any feeling in his right ear nor much sensation anywhere on the right side of his face.
The doctors are not sure, Hamilton says, if any of that comes back.
Moving forward, Hamilton will have to get follow-up CT scans as insurance against the cancer’s return.
Now, while Lepore is successfully recovering from his stroke, Hamilton is fully attacking his post-cancer goals.
To tell the story of Hamilton’s summer of adversity, EKU last week tweeted out a video in which the coach sits in a chair, faces the camera and explains all he has been through.
As of early Friday evening, the video had almost 89,000 views on Twitter and had been retweeted 556 times.
Hamilton says he’s gotten around 300 text messages, phone calls and/or emails in response to the video.
A lot of the replies, Hamilton says, are from people he doesn’t know.
“They are saying, ‘Hey, thank you so much for sharing your story. It’s inspired me and I’m going to get a physical.’ Or they say, ‘I’m going to the dermatologist,’” he says. “That’s the impact I want to have.”
A.W. Hamilton hopes he has beaten cancer.
He is telling his story.
His plan is to save another life — maybe yours.
