Southside man ready to resume his life after cancer treatment

There are so many things to look forward to.

Alex Hofer has been keeping track. He’s so excited to get back on a skateboard, picking back up the hobby he only discovered a few years ago.

And he can’t wait to get back in the kitchen to meticulously fix his signature fried chicken — a dish that takes days to properly make, between bringing and dredging and a special spice blend.

“I love fried chicken. When I was in the physical therapy hospital, I had a nurse and we spent hours comparing our fried chicken recipes,” he said.

Hofer has been forced to put much of his life on hold for the past year. Earlier this year, the southside Indianapolis resident was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a cancer that forms in bone and soft tissue. The cancer impacted his sciatic nerve, bladder and bowels, while also stealing away full use of his right leg.

Having completed treatment, he’s anticipating resuming all of the things he’s had to forego.

“It’s getting my strength back, getting ready to work again, getting ready to do all of the things I used to do,” he said.

Hofer, now 25, can pinpoint where his health started to deteriorate. While still in high school, he started getting random yet intense back pains.

He wasn’t initially concerned; he had worked a series of laborious jobs, including working in restaurant kitchens and setting gravestones in a cemetery. Somewhere along the way, he must have injured himself.

“I figured I lifted something wrong and tweaked something at some point. I didn’t think anything else of it,” he said.

Hofer dealt with the pain for years. He went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he studied English and literature. During his time at school, he picked up skateboarding.

But in December of 2022, his back pain grew significantly worse. He was working for a mortgage company at the time, and he admits the pain put him in a foul mood when dealing with customers. Three days before Christmas, he was fired.

“Obviously that was bad. Then the pain gets a little bit worse and little bit worse. By January, I’m completely bedridden,” he said. “It’s funny, I used to use one of those pedometer-style trackers on my phone, to count my steps. I was taking an average of 300,000 steps each month beforehand. In January, that number dropped to about 349 over the whole month.”

Because he lost his job, Hofer had to spend much of the early part of 2023 signing up for the Healthy Indiana insurance plan, just to address his back pain. He had convinced himself that it was aftereffects of a previous knee injury he suffered a few years prior.

Finally, he was able to see a Community Health Network knee specialist. As the doctor was feeling around, he found no structural problems with Hofer’s knee.

“So why am I in this horrible pain?” Hofer said. “He leans over and runs his finger down my spine, and touches my lower vertebrae. I immediately fall to the ground.”

The pain was so intense Hofer had to go to the Community Hospital South emergency room. He had X-rays taken, and doctors took a biopsy from his back. Within an hour, he was informed they were moving him to the oncology ward at Community MD Anderson Cancer Center-South.

They were 99% certain the mass found in his pelvis, as well as all of Hofer’s symptoms, pointed to cancer.

For the next month, he was confined to a hospital bed in the oncology ward, as his medical team ran tests to determine what kind of cancer it was. He lost the use of his right leg; even today, he needs to wear a brace and walk with a cane.

“That was the first few months — laying in a bed, losing feeling in my leg, waiting for some kind of treatment plan to be figured out,” he said.

At last, doctors pinned down the type of cancer impacting Hofer. Ewing sarcoma most often forms in the bones of the legs, arms, feet, hands, chest, pelvis, spine, or skull, according to the National Cancer Institute. Most of the time, it affects adolescents and young adults in their 20s.

The cancerous mass had started near Hofer’s hip. Additional scans later found it had spread to his spine, skull and ribs.

“It took us a while for us to know what it was. There was a biopsy that was done, but because it was a rare sarcoma, a disease that affects children, it took us a long time for us to get it back,” said Dr. Pablo Bedano, medical oncologist at Community MD Anderson Cancer Center-South. “He had to suffer a long time waiting for an answer, which was very hard for him and for us. So we were desperately trying to get some answers from the pathologist.”

Being diagnosed with cancer at such a young age was shocking. Still, he trusted the team at Community South, led by his medical oncologist Dr. Pablo Bedano.

“I was meeting with Dr. Bedano, and maybe my first and second question to him was, ‘Scale of 1 to 10, how good are my odds of beating this and not having any long-term effects?’ And he said 7,” Hofer said. “After that, I was pretty much OK with it.”

Before starting treatment, however, Hofer went through rigorous in-patient physical therapy to regain use of his right leg.

“In those two months I was bedridden, my legs had curled up, I’d lost a lot of muscle and couldn’t walk anymore. I went from the bed to a wheelchair to the physical therapy hospital,” he said. “That’s where I learned to walk again.”

Bedano recommended chemotherapy to attack the cancer. Hofer went through five days of infusions, then waited two weeks before having a strong single dose and waiting another two weeks.

He went through rounds of chemotherapy from March until late August.

“The treatments that it required was six months of very strong chemotherapy for which he had to be admitted to the hospital every three weeks,” Bedano said. “He had a great response, and we hope he goes through a great response for a long time.”

Now Hofer is finishing up with radiation treatments, after which he’ll go in for scans in November to determine the effectiveness of the treatment. He feels confident that treatment worked and he’ll move into the next phase of healing.

“People always talk about ‘scan anxiety,’ where you’re done with treatment and you’ll go get your scans done and it will come back. But I don’t really suffer from that too bad,” he said. “Worst comes to worst, I’ll just do more chemo. It’s not fun, but it’s far from the worst things I’ve had to deal with.”

Hofer’s medical team will continue to monitor him with scans, spreading out the frequency further and further as long as no cancer has returned.

Meanwhile, he’s focused on getting his life back on track. He plans to go back to school to earn his degree at the University of Indianapolis, and wants to find a new job.

Through his entire cancer ordeal, Hofer admits the disease has taken much from him. But at the same time, he’s learned some valuable lessons too.

“It’s shown how much people care about me, how much I matter to people in my life,” he said.

Alex Hofer

Age: 25

Diagnosis: Ewing sarcoma

Treatment: Chemotherapy, radiation, physical therapy

What has cancer taught you?

“It’s shown how much people care about me, how much I matter to people in my life.”

How has having cancer changed you?

“It’s changed me physically. Before all of this, I was doing yoga constantly. I was in really good shape. I was young and healthy. Unfortunately, cancer ruined my body in some ways. I can’t walk very well anymore. I don’t have the energy or the brain power like I used to.“

What would you say to someone just diagnosed?

“One of the places you find a lot of support when you have cancer is online forums. One of the things I’ve consistently noticed is, people would go online and be terrified — not of the cancer they had, but the treatment, because they heard all these terrible things about chemotherapy. I like to tell people, it may really turn out as bad as you’ve heard. But I’m willing to believe it’s probably going to be easier than you think. You’re probably stronger than you thought you were, you’re probably able to put up with a lot more than you thought you could. And when your life is on the line, you’re probably much more willing to fight for things like that.”