Analysis: Vikings tackle and cancer survivor David Quessenberry: ‘Adversity sometimes has a funny way of changing your life for the good’

Vikings left tackle and 10-year cancer survivor David Quessenberry is OK with you saying he beat the damned disease that’s touched all of us in some way. Just don’t go all cliché on him and say cancer gave him a new lease on life.

“I do have a new lease on life, but I won’t give cancer any credit for that,” Quessenberry said in the locker room after Monday’s practice. “I give credit to the love and strength I got from the people around me while I was going through that fight.”

People like Maegan, his wife. Before the diagnosis in June of 2014, they were distant friends who had drifted apart. Today, they’ve been happily married for five years and are raising a son, Teddy.

“Sometimes, adversity has a funny way of changing your life for the good,” Quessenberry said. “This brought her back into my life again. We’re in a good spot.”

David Lee Quessenberry Jr. wasn’t a guy many of us gave any thought to a week ago. He was a 34-year-old journeyman with a sixth-round pedigree quietly backing up Christian Darrisaw, a former first-round pick and one of the highest-paid tackles in NFL history.

That changed on the penultimate snap of the first half of Thursday’s 30-20 loss at the Rams. Darrisaw’s left ACL was torn. He’s out for the season with the Vikings riding a two-game losing streak with 10 more to play.

Quessenberry has started 32 of his 80 NFL games, including two playoff contests with Tennessee. He started four games in place of Darrisaw a year ago. He played 25 snaps (50%) of the Rams game and wasn’t particularly impressive, earning low marks from Pro Football Focus in pass protection (46.7).

The Vikings made a trade Tuesday night, getting left tackle Cam Robinson from Jacksonville and presumably keeping Quessenberry in a backup role.

“I’m just ready for whatever the team needs,” Quessenberry said. “I’ve been a starter. I’ve been a backup. I’ve seen guys go down during the game. I’ve seen guys go down in warmups. I’m always ready to roll. No matter what comes my way.”

Ain’t that the truth.

There wasn’t a college team in the country that offered Quessenberry a scholarship coming out of LaCosta Canyon High in Carlsbad, Calif., in 2008. He went to San Jose State as a 230-pound walk-on tight end only because he got to know a SJSU lacrosse recruiter who had been pursuing a high school lacrosse teammate named Curtis Hadzicki.

“I didn’t really ‘play’ lacrosse; I was the goalie,” Quessenberry says with a laugh. “I just stood there. That was the coaching point: Stand there, get big. And don’t flinch.”

Quessenberry earned a scholarship his sophomore year, when the Spartans were 1-12. He started 38 of 50 games and helped the Spartans to an 11-2 record and a trip to the Military Bowl as a senior.

The Texans drafted him 176th overall in 2013. He made the team. He was less than one week from the season opener. Coach Gary Kubiak had told him to be ready to get 10 to 12 reps. Family and friends had bought their flights from California to come see his NFL debut.

And …

“I broke my foot in practice,” Quessenberry said.

Quessenberry missed the 2013 season.

He came back strong in the spring of 2014. Then he started feeling fatigued all the time. He developed a dry cough that wouldn’t go away.

He almost passed out during an OTA in June that year. The Texans’ athletic trainer sent him to the emergency room to get an X-ray.

The X-ray led to an MRI, which led to a PET scan to look for cancer. That led to a biopsy, which led to a 23-year-old professional athlete looking up at “about 10 doctors” in his room telling him he had non-Hodgkin’s T-cell lymphoma.

And all of that happened in about 36 hours.

Quessenberry called his parents, who were on vacation in Europe. He felt guilty for ruining their vacation, but the word from the doctors was the cancer was “very rare and very aggressive.”

He started chemotherapy the next day at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. In what he called a “prayers come true” moment, he learned that MD Anderson had just developed a clinical treatment trial for this particular cancer.

Quessenberry spent three years in treatment. For 11 months, he underwent intensive chemotherapy. Every 21 days, he spent a week in the hospital getting chemo 24 hours a day. Then came radiation treatment for six months. Then two years of chemotherapy daily, then weekly, then monthly.

Then-Texans owner Bob McNair was being treated for cancer at MD Anderson at the time. He kept Quessenberry on the team’s injured reserve for those three years.

On Christmas Day 2017, Quessenberry finally made his NFL debut, playing 10 snaps for the Texans. He’d play one more game for them before moving on to Tennessee, where he worked his way up from the practice squad in 2018 to full-time starter in 2021 before he moved on to Buffalo in 2022.

“I got regular checkups every six months,’ Quessenberry said. “Then when you get five years out, they consider you healed. I’m super blessed.”

October is the NFL’s “Crucial Catch” cancer awareness month. Quessenberry likes sharing his story, and Vikings fans really should check out the episode he did four years ago on the “Bussin’ with the Boys” podcast with Will Compton and Taylor Lewan. But Quessenberry also refuses to let cancer define him.

“I take pride in my story and like to tell it to people who are going through what I went through,” Quessenberry said. “There’s great strength for them to see what can come out of their fight. But I will not let cancer be the centerpiece of my life story.”