In April 2003, I was a senior at Lynnfield High School, looking forward to graduation, proms, and senior-week activities. I had just returned from Ft. Lauderdale where I competed in National Swim Championships. It had been a wonderful cap for what had been an extraordinarily rewarding high school swimming career. The swim team I had started at my high school was doing well. I had just been named to the Boston Globe’s All-Scholastic All-Star Team.
The end of the year was bursting with activity. I was getting ready to re-join my crew team for the Spring season, and had just signed up for courses to upgrade my rating as a sailing instructor. The school’s music department held its culminating concerts, in which I played violin on one night, and saxophone on another. There were awards banquets to attend, National Honor Society induction presentations to make, AP exams to take, and last-minute details for senior-week activities to work out. I had several college acceptances in his pocket, with a couple of attractive scholarships; I was just holding off making a final choice until I heard final decisions from a small number of Ivy League schools to which I had applied. I was on top of the world and looking nowhere but to the future: a summer teaching sailing to children followed by the start of a college career.
Just before leaving for Nationals in Ft. Lauderdale, I noticed a swelling in my right upper thigh. I had been training hard all winter on two swim teams and thought it might simply be a pull or strain. When I returned, I had some scans done to rule out a hernia. But instead, the images showed a large tumor in my upper thigh. My parents immediately took me to the surgeon who had operated on my hips when I was twelve. I had just visited him a few months earlier; we talked about colleges and it was a good time for him to take a last look at how well my body had adapted to the hip surgery before I went off to college. For this visit, he asked an orthopedic oncologist to stand by to see me just in case. Before the day ended, the orthopedic oncologist took a biopsy, driving a neede deep into my leg and into the tumor. I’ve never felt pain so bad. For a couple of anxious days, we prayed that the mass was benign. It was not.
After a trip to Washington, DC., where we met a pioneering surgeon and with sarcoma specialists at the National Cancer Institute, we returned to Boston needing to decide which of two chemotherapy combinations to take. The pathology report had been inconclusive in terms of the specific type of sarcoma I had, so the choice of regimens was not clear cut. In the operating room at Children’s Hospital, a surgeon inserted a portable catheter designed to make it easier and safer to deliver chemotherapy, and took another biopsy.
One bright spot that week was learning that I had been accepted to Columbia for the Fall, majoring in engineering. Columbia was my first-choice school. Later that week, doctors described my treatment plan to me, expected to last ten to twelve months. I would need to defer.
Within another week, I started chemotherapy. I was soon taking what seemed like a handful of pills each day simply to try to counter the side-effects of the anti-cancer drugs, and giving myself two injections a day to dissolve suspected blood clots near the tumor. In May I spent more time in the hospital than out of it. I missed my girlfriend’s junior prom and several of the senior-week activities I had helped organize, and had to re-schedule my AP exams. We scheduled my chemo treatments so that I could attend my senior prom (in a wheelchair) and graduation (on crutches).
By the end of June, most of my hair had fallen out. This was ironic because, as a swimmer, you keep your hair short and, for important swim meets, I would shave my legs! Now I was completely hairless, yet I could not swim. My mom and I spent long portions of our vacation in Kennebunk back in Boston for treatments, but I continued to work as a sailing instructor there.
In August my family took me to Washington to have the tumor removed. The chemotherapy had not been very effective on the tumor, but at least no other tumors could be detected. The surgery opened me from just above my knee cap all the way up to my right abdomen. Within a couple of weeks, I was beginning to get around. We changed to an even more aggressive chemotherapy regimen and one requiring longer stays in the hospital and more blood transfusions. For six weeks in the Fall, I went in for daily radiation treatments. At first, they seemed to do little more than give my leg a slight sunburn. But over time, the radiation reversed some of the healing of the surgical wound.
By the holidays, I was more having more difficulty tolerating the lengthy hospital stays than the chemotherapy. I was getting pretty beat up, and was often tired, but I was able to manage the nausea pretty well. I had arranged with Columbia that I could take a Calculus course at BU, and transfer the credits to Columbia. The course and the homework kept me busy.