MATTESON, IL — For most of her life, Jasmine “Jazz” Matthews ruled basketball courts, a lights-out shooter who could stick a three-pointer and play lock-down defense.
She led Marian Catholic High School to the state quarterfinals three times. At Bowling Green University, Matthews immediately made her mark, earning a spot on the Mid-America Conference All-Freshman team.
These days, Matthews’ hardcourt accomplishments are faded memories. At 26, Matthews faces a new opponent, her toughest foe yet. Multiple sclerosis took away her ability to walk on her own and crushed her dream of becoming an NCAA referee.
“It’s such an unpredictable and unkind disease,” said Jasmine’s mom, Genell Matthews, a nurse who works in the pediatric intensive care unit at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital. “No parent wants their child to struggle or suffer — you want it to be you. I have no control over it. I want to fix it and I can’t.”
Jasmine alternates between grueling physical therapy sessions and at-home workouts to build up her diminished strength and endurance, and convince doctors she’s strong enough to undergo a risky stem-cell transplant that could radically improve her condition — and maybe even cure it.
On top of the medical obstacles she has to clear is a sizable financial one: Her insurance company has refused to pay for the six-figure procedure, which her hard-working suburban family can’t afford.
She’s responded to the insurance company’s roadblock with her own pick and roll, of sorts, launching a GoFundMe to raise the money to pay for the transplant. That tenacity was a hallmark of Jasmine’s playing career, and her refusal to back down now surprises no one who ever took the court alongside her.
“She’s always exceeded expectations,” said Annie Byrne, Jasmine’s coach at Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights. “Why should she stop now?”
These days, Jasmine spends a lot of her time in her bedroom on the second floor of the Matthews family’s home on a quiet cul-de-sac in south suburban Matteson. A few mementos sit on the dresser, but the room is devoid of trophy-filled shelves or reminders of athletic glory.
She gets around mostly in a wheelchair, though her physical therapy homework does require her to move around her house with her walker — always with an assist from her dad, Jerod Matthews, or another member of her extensive support team that springs into action, carrying her up and down the stairs when she needs to move around the house.
“I only weigh 120 pounds, so for two people it’s only 60 pounds each,” she said.
Physically, she’s not the same elite athlete who faced off against top Division I players, but her years of intense training have allowed her to maintain a look that belies the seriousness of her condition. If you saw Jasmine when she’s not wearing her Chicago Blackhawks-themed leg braces, sitting in a wheelchair or pushing a walker, you might just think she’s still a regular on the basketball court.
What you can’t see is her immune system attacking her body’s nervous system. It causes inflammation that damages the myelin that insulates nerve fibers, causing a variety of symptoms that vary in MS patients — both in type and severity. Jasmine’s form of the disease is called relapsing-remitting MS because it manifests through periodic attacks that come and go, followed by periods of recovery. It progressed to the point where she could no longer walk on her own.
“My baseline is this,” Jasmine says, motioning to her wheelchair. “You could look at somebody and they’d say, ‘I have MS’ and you would have no idea. But you look at me and you know.”
A Coach’s Dream
Jasmine started playing for Byrne at Marian Catholic in 2007, but they were hardly strangers.
“Jasmine was a kid I’d been eyeing for a long time,” Byrne said. “She had a really special talent. She had an incredible work ethic.”
Jasmine would go on to lead the Spartans to a record of 110-27 over the course of her four years, three of which she served as captain. Her teams would advance to the final eight teams in the state playoffs three times, and amassed 1,265 points in a high-school career that left big-time college coaches drooling. After graduating from Marian Catholic in 2011, Jasmine went to play for Curt Miller at Bowling Green State University.
“The thing that drew us to Jasmine is I loved her competitiveness,” recalled Miller, now the head coach and general manager of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun. “I thought she had not only ability to make 3s but I also loved her on the defensive end.”
Jasmine had an immediate impact, playing in all 31 games and starting the last 21. She made the MAC’s All-Freshman team.
“It was unbelievable,” said Miller, remembering a player who was consistent shooting from the perimeter, a “lock-down” defender and a “low-drama” player.
“She was a coach’s dream,” he said.
In every way, she still is. The physical therapists who are her new “coaches” who push Jasmine toward her new goal — walking on her own — say she pushes herself like she’s out to win a championship.
During a recent physical therapy session at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Outpatient & DayRehab Center Burr Ridge, Jasmine kneeled on a padded bed, her arms on a large yellow exercise ball. Physical therapist Mansi Thakkar steadied her hips and calls out the commands, prompting Jasmine to use her arms to push her body up off the ball. Jasmine’s face was emotionless as Thakkar counted — one, two, three, four — until her coach hit 15. She grimaced, and lowered herself on the ball.
“Maybe next time we’ll go for 20,” Thakkar said as Jasmine rested. In a few seconds, Thakkar started to count again. Jasmine pushed her arms against the ball, lifting herself and holding her weight as the count grew.
“Seventeen!” Thakkar said. “Oh you got it!”
Jasmine blew past 20 seconds with only an occasional strained expression. As Thakkar reached a count of 35 she finally rests. Next time up the count reached 50 before her arms gave way.
It’s the same kind of steady progress Matthews has shown since the day more than a year ago when she first started working with Stacey Lane, a doctor of physical therapy at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab facility.
“When I first started working with her she could barely get herself up from a lying position. She couldn’t voluntarily and independently move from position to position,” Lane said. “Since then it’s remarkable.”
Just as scientists can’t pinpoint a cause of MS, Jasmine said she’s not sure what’s behind her progress in recent months. Maybe it’s the infusions of the chemotherapy drug cytoxan she gets every month or so. Maybe it’s the physical therapy. Maybe it was her decision late last year to become a vegan — a big deal for a young woman who loved her steaks and chicken and burgers.
“I don’t know what is helping. It could be a combination of those things … and maybe God, she said. “You don’t know.”
Lane credits Jasmine’s history as an athlete with her success in physical therapy.
“I tell her all the time she’s very coachable,” Lane said. She takes direction well, continues her therapy with exercises at home after she leaves the sessions and she refuses to give up — even on the toughest days when her disease leaves her wiped out.
“When people are faced with adversity at such a young age, it does take some of that fortitude,” Lane said. “She’s not just going to give up. She doesn’t see it as an option to not walk. She’s going to walk — she has that in her mindset.”
Jasmine said her days as a basketball player taught her how to push herself.
“Most people who come in there probably don’t know how to go to their extreme limit,” she said. “I know what my limit is.”
Even after a strenuous therapy session, Jasmine still has gas in the tank. She’s spent the last hour and a half stretching, walking on a treadmill, battling the exercise ball and playing catch with a medicine ball. After all that, she still had strength to wheel around the facility, giving her visitor a tour, talking about how she plans to go home and do some reading, and giving her dad a playful smack on the knee to let him know she’s ready to go.
“I’m not going to go home and take a nap. I’ve got too much to do,” she said as she heads for the exit, her dad and grandma in tow.
“Something’s Not Right”
About three years ago, after Jasmine wrapped up grad school at Bowling Green, she came home to work for Byrne, who by then had left coaching and was the general manager of an athletic complex in a nearby suburb.
She had earned her master’s degree in sports management, and, for a while at least, all signs pointed to her attaining her dream of becoming a college hoops referee.
“Unfortunately I saw it happen right before my own eyes,” Byrne said. “It was very sad.”
Jasmine started noticing strange things happening with her body. In retrospect, she wonders if the injuries that had cut into her playing time during her last three years at Bowling Green— two fractures in her right leg, deteriorating cartilage in her left — were earlier hints that something more serious was at work.
“They say a lot of symptoms of MS can be missed, especially if you were dealing with a lot of stress,” she said. “I was in grad school … so there was a lot of stuff I would have been alarmed by or alerted that ‘Hey, this isn’t right,’ but I was just trying to graduate and come home so I probably didn’t pay as much attention to my body as I should have.”
Jasmine started experiencing numbness in her feet, occasional spasms.
“It would come as spasms and just stop … not anything for me to be like ‘Hey, something’s wrong,'” she said. But by October 2017 the numbness started to spread up her body. “That’s when we were kind of like, ‘All right, something’s not right.'”
Doctors started a series of tests intended to rule out various causes of Jasmine’s symptoms. She saw neurologists, underwent MRIs. She had to have a spinal tap.
“I remember the first time I got a call and he said I maybe had MS,” she said. ‘That was devastating.”
When the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis was confirmed, Jasmine said she “didn’t really get a second to understand what was going on, because it was all happening so quick.”
Apart from cases of severe MS, which are rare, the prognosis for longevity is generally good — on average, most people with MS live only seven years less than those in the general population, and die from cancer, heart disease and other normal ailments.
A nurse who noticed Jasmine in a hospital hallway first introduced her to the idea of a stem-cell transplant to treat MS. In the procedure, doctors remove stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow, use chemotherapy to wipe out the immune system and then inject the stem cells back into the body in hopes of “rebooting” the immune system in a way that it know longer treats the nervous system as its enemy.
“It could have a significant impact. It could have the potential to cure me,” Jasmine said. “I know the doctors won’t say that. But former patients say that.”
Jasmine’s doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago declined to comment for this story, citing her ongoing treatment. But Jasmine said there was some reticence on the part of her treatment team to pursuing a stem-cell transplant because of how compromised her body was.
“They were like, ‘We think we can help you because you’re so young, there’s promise in your future. We just aren’t sure because of how severe it is.'”
Her mom, Genell Matthews, said the severity of Jasmine’s condition at the time also led to their insurance company’s decision not to cover a transplant. That inspired Jasmine to launch the GoFundMe campaign to raise money to cover the procedure, which carries a six-figure price tag. As of mid-October the campaign had secured pledges of $92,865 of its $125,000 goal.
In the meantime, the neurologists continue to push Jasmine to become more mobile and make herself more physically prepared for a transplant, Genell Matthews said. Doctors first wanted her to be able to walk a certain distance before being considered for the procedure, but progressively have raised the bar.
“Now they say she has to be able to get up and walk on her own,” said a frustrated Genell Matthews. “They keep changing the criteria in the middle of everything.”
Still, “we’re getting her ready for that part,” she said. “We’re waiting for her to get the call.”
As Jasmine and her supporters wait and pray for the day when she might be able to get a transplant, she continues her treatment regimen.
Every month or so she heads to Northwestern in downtown Chicago for a low dose of the chemotherapy drug cytoxan, which is designed to attack the immune cells that are inflicting the damage on her nervous system. Those treatments require her to spend a few days in the hospital each time. She takes medication four times a day to control spasms, her mom said, and she goes to physical therapy three times a week. In between she does exercises at home.
A New Team
Since her diagnosis, a remarkable network of family, friends, caregivers and more have rallied around Jasmine.
In that immediate circle are her mom and dad, her sister Jerell (an accomplished basketball player in her own right) and her grandma, Betty Ateman. Ateman is a retired certified nursing assistant who lives in New Orleans but who has spent most of the past few months traveling back and forth to stay at the Matthews’ home and help Jasmine, racking up frequent-flyer miles along the way.
“I think I’m close to 30,000 now,” Ateman said with a laugh. “I’m retired, it’s just me living by myself, so I come and help her.”
Someone is always with Jasmine, 24/7. If it’s not her parents, grandma or sister, it’s a paid caregiver — or a friend.
“We’re all in this journey together,” said her dad, Jerod Matthews, an account manager with Feeding America, a nonprofit nationwide network of food banks.
Former coach Byrne frequently comes by to hang out, too.
“The other day my sister and Coach Byrne carried me downstairs and out to her car and we went out,” Jasmine said.
On Sundays, members of Covenant United Church of Christ in South Holland come to Jasmine’s house to visit with her and pray over her. The visits are fitting for a young woman — and a family — who cite faith frequently when talking about Jasmine’s struggles.
“I’ve had to look at myself in the mirror and tell myself to be patient because God’s timing is everything. If he wanted me to be better sooner than he would have,” Jasmine said.
“You don’t know if he’s waiting for something to fall in line, or I’m not ready yet mentally … I just don’t know what the reasoning s. But that doesn’t stop our plan here. With me being an athlete I know exactly what I need to do at home. I strengthen my core, I do squats every day. We practice walking with the walker.”
And she reads. A lot. About 25 books, many of them inspirational self-improvement titles, in a month or so.
“I’m all about self development right now and making sure my mind’s right and I’m ready to step back into life … and be ready for what God has ready for me,” she said.
“I know I wasn’t ready for this, so I need to be ready for the next thing.”