There was a time not long ago — this summer to be exact — when Evan Carnes ’20 was focused on one thing and one thing only: his new-found passion for teaching and coaching football.
A few months later, everything changed. In August, Evan started experiencing severe headaches and sometimes struggled with his balance. He chalked them up to migraines or sinus infections, which his brother and sister frequently endured. When the symptoms wouldn’t go away, he went to a doctor.
These days, instead of being in a classroom, Evan is at Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro. He shows up each morning, five days a week, for radiation treatment that will run up to Christmas.
It's not what Evan, a former tight end on the Quakers’ football team, was expecting his 2022 to look like. Or his 2023, but at 25, an age when most people feel invincible, Evan was diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a malignant tumor of the central nervous system.
Four days after that diagnosis, Evan underwent surgery to have the cancerous tumor removed from the back of his head near his spine. The mass was so indistinguishable from Evan’s brain that doctors performed a second surgery last month to remove what they hope was the rest of the tumor.
“I have two ways to look at things: getting down on myself and feeling pity or being thankful for where I am right now with the people around me. That’s such an easy decision to make.”
“This isn’t how I thought I’d be spending the fall, that’s for sure,” Evan says, “but I’m not going to think about the negative. There’s too many positive things I can focus on to start feeling down.”
Those positives that Evan quickly lists include the cards, letters, phone calls, care packages and texts he regularly receives from family and friends, including many Guilfordians. “Gifts,” he calls them “that come every day in some form or another.”
Chief among those gifts is Evan’s girlfriend, Corby Brooke ’21, a Guilford Presidential Fellow who has been with him from the start. Corby and Evan, Evan and Corby. They’ve been together at Guilford since they started dating in 2020.
At first glance, there was little to suggest the two would have much in common. Corby was born and raised in Alaska before moving to North Carolina in high school. The first time Evan ever lived outside Marietta, Ga., was when he showed up to attend Guilford.
Their love of sports — Corby played soccer at Guilford — brought them together. That and Evan’s smile which, in Corby’s world, beamed like headlights. Still does.
“He’s just so easy going and positive,” she says. “He always finds the good in people and when things go bad. I needed that in someone when we first started dating, and he’s been that and more.”
That sentiment, says Evan, goes both ways. “I don’t know what I’d be doing or where I’d be if it weren’t for her,” he says. “Corby takes me to every (doctor’s) appointment, she’s either waiting in the lobby for me or in the room with me to remember what the doctor says so my family gets everything straight. If I’m feeling down, Corby's there to make me smile.
“She’s always here for me.”
Evan was certain he wanted a career in business to go with the Business degree he earned at Guilford. But after graduating he spent four months volunteering as a defensive line coach for the Quakers. Now he wants to coach football at the high school level in the afternoons while teaching students in the mornings.
He spent August and September working as a substitute teacher in Guilford County Schools. “It was kind of a surprise to me how much I liked being in a classroom with kids,” he says. “To be able to do that and coach football would be a dream.”
For now the classroom and that dream are on hold. Evan knows he has a long road to recovery. After radiation treatments the next six weeks, doctors will determine if chemotherapy is needed. Treatment failure and relapse occurs in up to one-third of patients diagnosed with medulloblastoma. None of which fazes Evan.
“I have two ways to look at things: getting down on myself and feeling pity or being thankful for where I am right now with the people around me,” he says. “That’s such an easy decision to make.”
Friends of Evan have established a Go Fund Me page to help cover medical bills that have already started mounting. Corby says the Guilford community has given to Evan in ways that can’t be measured. “They’re just as special as his own family,” she says. “It’s been great seeing so many people reach out to him.”