After three stressful years, Mark Sevillano Jr. felt like his life was falling into place. At the start of 2024, he began working out at the gym three days a week and eating healthier foods.
“I felt better and just when I started feeling better, I … couldn’t really swallow my food comfortably,” the 41-year-old from Santa Fe Springs, California, tells TODAY.com. “I felt like it almost would get stuck in my throat.”
He’d “chug” water, and that often helped the food move through his esophagus. After two months, his symptoms worsened, and he visited a doctor, who reluctantly ordered a swallow test for Sevillano. Before he could undergo the exam, he visited the emergency room, where he learned he had esophageal cancer.
“I would have never imagined that I had any cancer, let alone esophageal cancer,” he says. “I’ve never even said the word esophagus. It was not on my radar at all.”
Transformation Leads to Diagnosis
In 2021, Sevillano's 11-year marriage ended in divorce, and the dad of two was stressed. At the same time, he was in college completing his teaching degree. By 2024, he had graduated from college and finally began to feel settled as he regularly attended the gym, ate healthy foods and ran a few 5Ks.
“'I’m healing,'” he recalls thinking. “I was losing a little bit of weight, but I thought it was because of my new lifestyle.”
Soon after, his swallowing problems began. At first, drinking a lot of water helped. But after two months, swallowing became even more difficult.
“I would have to literally pound my chest with my fist to help break down the pathway to allow my food to go down,” Sevillano explains. “That was so odd now that I think back on it. But at the time I thought, ‘Oh, I need a little extra help to digest my food.’”
His parents urged him to visit his doctor, and after a couple of weeks, he did. But his primary care doctor “didn’t sound too concerned” because Sevillano was young and there was no family history of cancer. Still, Sevillano asked for a swallow test — which his mother, who is a nurse — told him to request.
“He was like, ‘We’ll schedule a swallow test in the future. I’m not too worried about it,’” Sevillano recalls. “Looking back on it, I was like, ‘Wow, there are so many red flags.’”
He scheduled the appointment for several months later. But his swallowing “got progressively worse.”
“I couldn’t even swallow liquid anymore,” he says. “It would sit in my throat, almost like a drain that is clogged up, and it’s filling up with water. You need to unplug the drain. It felt like that.”
Sevillano visited the emergency room, and at first, the doctors were “perplexed” by his swallowing difficulties. But they conducted bloodwork and even had him undergo a CT scan. At about 4 a.m., his blood test results returned.
“(The doctor) said, ‘Hey, to let you know your bloodwork came back great and the next thing we’re waiting on is your scan, and I’m sure that’s going to come back great as well,’” Sevillano recalls.
Less than an hour later, the doctor returned with a grim look on his face.
“He said, ‘Unfortunately, we got your scan back and we found a mass in the center of your chest, in your lower part of your esophagus,’” Sevillano says.
At the time, he didn’t realize doctors sometimes interchangeably use mass and tumor, so he wasn’t too worried.
“If he would have said, ‘You have a tumor,’ I would have freaked out a little more,’” Sevillano says.
He stayed in the hospital to undergo tests, including a biopsy. But when doctors attempted it, they struggled to pass the scope through all the inflammation in his throat. Though they tried a smaller scope, the sample they removed wasn’t enough to determine if it was cancerous. Still, they released Sevillano from the hospital, and he ran a 5K two days later.
Sevillano's doctors scheduled a second biopsy. But before that happened, he became very ill.
“(This) is where I almost died,” he says.
As he waited for the new biopsy and maintained a liquid-only diet, Sevillano became tired.
“My body just didn’t feel right,” he says. “I started to feel light-headed, almost as if I’m going to faint.”
He rested on the couch and began “convulsing,” and “shaking and shivering.” After he put on a coat and a hat to warm himself up, his mom noticed he was too pale. They returned to the emergency room, where doctors diagnosed him with sepsis, a potentially fatal overreaction in the body to infection.
“My body was shutting down and they had to pump me with any type of antibiotics to fight the infection that was rapidly going through my bloodstream,” Sevillano says. “For the next four days, I was fighting and trying to get the infection out of my body.”
As he began to recover, doctors performed the biopsy, and they diagnosed him with Stage 2 esophageal cancer in June 2024.
“I got thrown into a world of ‘Now you have cancer,’” he says.
Doctors quickly came up with a treatment plan, which included four rounds of chemotherapy to shrink the tumor followed by surgery to remove the mass and most of his esophagus, what is known as an esophagectomy. For the most part, chemotherapy caused exhaustion, brain fog and some neuropathy, but after the fourth round, he “started actually vomiting black stuff.”
“It was still awful,” he says. “I took it like a champ. But I think it could have been worse.”
Surgery took place in October and was intense. Doctors removed six inches of his esophagus, which is about 10 inches long in total, and a strawberry-sized tumor. Doctors used his upper intestine to create a new esophagus connected to his remaining organ.
“I went in with a smile on my face and said, ‘OK, let’s do this. Let’s take this tumor out,’” Sevillano says. “When I woke up, I had maybe eight tubes in my side, in my face. I was in severe pain.”
After recovering in the hospital for several days and undergoing more tests, Sevillano returned home. About a month later, he underwent one more round of chemotherapy. Doctors recommended that he have another three, but he felt overwhelmed by his prior chemotherapy and treatment and elected to stop. Since his surgery, there has been no evidence of disease. He will undergo regular scans for five years.
“I had my six-month check-up scan and that came out with no detection of cancer,” he says. “I went to the beach and celebrated six months of being cancer-free.”
An Increase in GI Cancers in Young People
Sevillano is part of a trend of young people being diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancers, which include colorectal, stomach, pancreatic and esophageal cancers. These diagnoses are increasing faster than any other type of cancer in adults under 50, according to a review published in the journal JAMA.
While colorectal cancer cases in young people have increased the most, pancreatic, stomach and esophageal cancer diagnoses are also on the rise, according to NBC News reporting. The latter three do not have a screening test like colorectal cancer does, making them harder to diagnose early.
While more research is needed, the cause of all gastrointestinal cancer in young adults could be the same. Researchers suspect causes include having a sedentary lifestyle, being obese, smoking, drinking alcohol and eating an unhealthy diet.
“It’s really what people were doing or exposed to when they were infants, children, adolescents that is probably contributing to their risk of developing cancer as an adult, Kimmie Ng, co-author of the paper and director of the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told NBC News.
Genetic predispositions to cancer also contribute to about 15% to 30% of diagnoses of young-onset gastrointestinal cancers. Inherited conditions, such as Lynch syndrome, can contribute to early-onset colorectal cancer diagnoses, TODAY.com previously reported.
“We do recommend that all young patients diagnosed under the age of 50 undergo testing for hereditary conditions,” Ng said.
Yet young people diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancers face poorer outcomes than their peers. Much like Sevillano’s doctor dismissed his early concerns about swallowing, many young people find their doctors downplaying their concerns because they’re not considering gastrointestinal cancers in people under 50. That could contribute to diagnosis in later stages.
“My personal feeing is that it’s because we’re finding them at a more advanced stage because people don’t really think of colon or other GI cancers when they see a young person with these nonspecific complaints,” Dr. Howard Hochster, director of gastrointestinal oncology at Rutgers Cancer Institute and RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey, told NBC News.
Though Ng said it’s possible that GI cancers in younger people “may be biologically different and more aggressive.”
‘My Spirit is Not Broken’
After so many months of not being able to eat normally, Sevillano still struggles with getting enough nutrition. He’s been eating “mini meals” throughout the day, which reduces the stress on his GI tract.
“I’m still underweight,” he says. “I was 195 at 5 feet 10 inches, nice and healthy and strong. Now I weigh 138 pounds. My arms are like twigs.”
The doctor told him complete recovery could take several years.
“It’s going to take some time for me to reach a healthy weight again and create some muscle and strength,” he says.
Sevillano says he hopes that others learn the importance of advocating for their health and urges them to get second opinions if they feel as if their doctor isn’t addressing their symptoms.
“Don’t wait like I did,” he says. “If something is wrong with your body, do not ignore it, but act on it right away.”
Despite all the difficulties he faced, Sevillano feels like he’s in a good place.
“My heart has been through a lot, and I learned that the human capacity for pain and tragedy (means) we can endure a lot and keep going forward. I’d like to be that example to other people,” he says. “I’m still a happy, positive person. I love life and my spirit is not broken.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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