By Sommer Hamilton

He thought about it then, pulling on the well-worn Milwaukee Brewers hat and leaving the Nashville hotel room he shared with his mother every day of chemotherapy for three months. I don’t want this hat to define me.

It wasn’t the hat, really. It was the cancer. Six months later, home in his studies in College Station, Mark Ingle took the hat off and took a seat in a barber shop. His hair, grown back after chemo, was lighter now, thin and patchy in places but long and infuriating in others. For a moment, he eased back into the skilled palms of the barber, and it was like the hat never existed.

“I didn’t want to be known as the guy letting cancer define who I am,” he says earnestly, assessing the view from a window in the Wehner building this December. “It did define me while I was sick. But I always just wanted to come back and be a normal Ag. You know when you’re 20, it’s what you want to do—study and have a social life.”

Mark Ingle enjoys Kyle Field this fall with his girlfriend, Abby Rossellini ’08.

Ingle was first diagnosed with testicular cancer in September 2005. It has been a full year now since his chemo ended, nine months since the devastating invasive surgery that cleared most of the lymph nodes from his abdominal cavity. Six months since he started classes again, finally, embracing the halls of Wehner with more glee than anyone who’s prayed to be able to take accounting exams again.

And now, it's been just weeks since Ingle graduated with a bachelor’s in accounting and a master’s in information systems. He was only a semester behind his peers, despite cancer’s attempts to derail him. He kept up with classes from his recovery couch and hospital room, never losing touch of his desire to gain an education.

Ingle’s odyssey
Ingle still shakes his head in wonder at the personal odyssey that threatened to do more than interrupt his studies.

It happened so fast. He was tailgating before the Clemson game on Aug. 25, 2005, complaining about lumps on his chest, when a family friend told him to pay attention to any new aches and pains. Later that weekend, he felt a telltale pain searing through his midsection. That Friday, a Bryan urologist took 20 seconds to diagnose Ingle. “You’ve got testicular cancer, and you’ve got to get it removed—now.”

Just days after that first surgery, he was propped awkwardly in the car, driving to Houston’s MD Anderson for a CAT Scan, when Hurricane Katrina changed everything.  So they headed to Nashville’s Vanderbilt Medical Center instead. And for the next six months of chemo, a second major surgery and recovery, Ingle split his time between Nashville and his parents’ home in North Carolina.

At one point after he had finished chemo, doctors told Ingle he had a 90 percent chance of surviving. He looked at his mother. “What had it been before?” he asked, but they both realized they never wanted to know.

The small things
Today, Ingle is almost in the clear. He’s set to start his first job this month, as a security and technology solutions man at Ernst & Young in Houston. He’s moving into his first post-college apartment with a best friend from Texas A&M.

He still gets monthly checkups, but with cancer no one ever really uses the word “cured.”

Returning to finish his last year of school on a compressed timetable, Ingle found, was easier than he had hoped. He had, after all, just beaten cancer. School seemed more manageable by comparison.