Harold Fuller used to sleep in the car.

Coming home from Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., Fuller was too weak from chemotherapy to stay awake. When he did wake, it was only because he was sick to his stomach.

Fuller hasn't had to worry about chemotherapy in two decades. Currently the general manager of the Odessa Roughnecks, Fuller's team will be playing with pink footballs at 7 p.m. tonight against the Corpus Christi Hammerheads to raise breast cancer awareness.

Seven autographed pink footballs will be auctioned off to raise money for the American Cancer Society.

Fuller will be watching closely.

"That's why this night's important," Fuller said. "It's not just about a football game. This one takes extra importance to me personally, and I think to a lot of people."

Fuller's father, Burdette, a United Methodist pastor, died of leukemia when Harold was 15. His mother, Shirley Perkins, battled breast cancer 10 years ago.

And Fuller has already had to fight off his own bout with cancer.

Three years after his dad died, Fuller left his hometown, Angelica, N.Y., to attend Houghton College, a small Christian school in Western New York.

"That's when I started to feel lumps in my neck," Fuller said. "At the school they told me it was mono."

Mononucleosis doesn't cause the lumps Fuller was experiencing. It could have caused his fatigue, and his night sweats, but not those lumps.

 By the time his father's doctor treated him, Fuller had a grapefruit-sized lump in his neck and an even bigger lump in his abdomen.

At age 18, Fuller had Hodgkin's Disease, a form of cancer that affects the lymph nodes.

Fuller's cancer was already at Stage III.

If Hodgkin's disease reaches Stage IV, there is almost nothing a doctor can do.

"Five to 10 years before I was diagnosed, the disease had a very small cure rate," Fuller said. "When I was diagnosed, they said that if you were going to have cancer, that was the one you wanted to have."

By that time, Hodgkin's Disease could be cured.

But getting rid of the disease wasn't easy. Forced to undergo chemotherapy for more than a year, Fuller spent most of his 19th year traveling back and forth to Rochester for treatment.

He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the hospital.

"He'd be home for three or four weeks, and then back to the hospital," Fuller's mother, Shirley Perkins, said. "They took out his spleen. He was so weak, I thought we were going to lose him."

Chemotherapy is designed to kill cells both good and bad. Chemotherapy causes joint pain, small veins, nausea and a host of other side-effects that nearly killed Fuller.

Injections between his toes. Spinal taps. Recovering from Hodgkin's Disease seemed more painful than the disease itself.

"They had to put a central line in my chest," Fuller said. "It got infected, and I ended up with blood clots in my lungs. If one of those would have dislodged, I would have passed away."

Fuller was lucky.

Chemotherapy worked. More than a year after the first day he entered treatment, Fuller skipped out of Strong Memorial Hospital in sheer joy.

He headed straight back to college.

For more than 20 years, Fuller's Hodgkin's Disease has been in remission, a sign that he has been cured.

But his mother has had breast cancer since then. She survived, and gets a regular mammogram every two or three months.

Cancer has always been a part of Fuller's family life. So has beating the disease.

"It was a difficult time, but we all made it," Perkins said.  "You do, one day at a time, one prayer at a time."

The Roughnecks are hoping a few pink footballs can help.