On March 9 Alex Mann (Sc’16) marked a special anniversary: five years without cancer.

The day marked a sort of conclusion to a journey of loss and triumph.

The loss of a promising future in baseball. The loss of an 18-cm section of his humerus, the bone in your upper arm. Triumph over adversity at so many levels.

Now, at the dawn of a new stage in his life, he’s looking to give back.

To celebrate, Mann, who at the age of 17 was diagnosed with Ewing’s Cell Sarcoma, a rare form of childhood bone cancer, has launched an online fundraising campaign that will benefit two of the charities that helped him through his darkest days: Childhood Cancer Canada and Children’s Wish.

In less than two weeks, he raised more than $11,000. It has been an enlightening exercise.

“Getting $11,000, it’s overwhelming, the amount of support. When I first put it up, the amount of people who were sharing it and sending me thoughtful messages, it just blew me away,” he says. “I have some really good friends here at Queen’s but I just didn’t realize the amount of support I really had. People are reaching out to me personally and some of these people I haven’t spoken to in years.”

It was also thanks to the support of his close friends that he initiated the campaign and the five-year mark had always seemed to be the right time.

Anyone who has fought cancer or is close to someone with the deadly disease, knows that the fifth anniversary is a key waypoint in the journey.

While not an absolute, in the majority of cases it marks a successful end of the battle.

For Mann, it certainly was a special day.

“Waking up it was just like, all right, it worked, I was okay, I was living, I was healthy,” he says. “I kept having these flashback memories of the hospital. Some good moments and some bad moments and it was just crazy for me to think that was five years ago today, that I was leaving the hospital. I won’t ever forget that.”

He also won’t forget the shock, pain and trials that he and his family went through in his “lost year.”

It was May 2009 and Mann was riding high, having just celebrated his 17th birthday and in the midst of a solid baseball campaign. But then he felt a pain in the upper portion of his left arm, the one he used for fielding. It wasn’t the usual ache that comes from playing ball, so he went to the hospital to get it checked out.

What happened next would change his life forever – he was diagnosed with cancer.

“It was surreal. I was a healthy guy. It was baseball on the weekends strictly,” he says. “You ask ‘How did this really happen and how did it develop?’ It’s not the right question to ask yourself. At the time you always think things happen because of the way you live.”

A bit of research and Mann learned that in most cases of cancer, there isn’t a specific reason or cause. It just happens.

A mere three weeks later he would undergo his first seven rounds of chemotherapy. In November he had surgery, removing the bone and part of his deltoid and replacing it with a metal rod linking his shoulder and elbow joint.

After two weeks of recuperation, there were seven more rounds of chemotherapy.

At the end of it, he was literally a shadow of his former self. His body had been wracked by the aggressive treatments. He had lost 30 pounds.

Yet he was alive and the outlook was good. Doctors told him the chemotherapy had destroyed 99 per cent of the cancerous cells.

Through it all, he set himself a number of goals, including getting back to playing baseball, which he would do the next year and eventually would go on to pitch for the Queen’s Gaels. He also made sure he set himself up for a good education.

Mann wasn’t alone and had a lot of support, first and foremost from his family, but also from a number of foundations, including Childhood Cancer Canada and Children’s Wish.

He credits his parents for ensuring he put up a good fight. They simply told him “never give up.” And they hammered it home.

He has shared that simple message with others as they begin their treatment.

“For the most part I was just pushing them and saying there is going to be a life after cancer. And there is a life after cancer,” he says. “You can’t count yourself out. You’re going to come out beaten and bruised and, you know, I came out totally different than I thought I was going to. You have to have that goal. You can’t let yourself get depressed about it. It’s not going to make the situation better. Asking ‘Why me?’ is not going to help anything. You just have to put it in perspective and you just have to stay up as much as you can.”

Mann’s campaign can be found at tilt.com/campaigns/alex-mann-five-years-and-counting.