Casey
Age: 19 years old
Freshman at a small community college in Virginia.
Hobbies: cheerleading, horseback riding, reading, shopping, and hanging out with her friends
Diagnosis: Osteosarcoma at age 13 in her right leg
Family: She considers her family huge, including her mom, dad, sister Kelly (who is 24 and away at college), and both sets of her grandparents. She also has 2 horses, 2 cats, a dog and a parrot that she considers family members.
Friends: Since she just started college, she is working on making a lot of new friends. Most of her close friends from high school, who were on the cheering squad with her, have gone away to college. She really misses them all. She was dating a guy for awhile in high school, but he went away to college too and he recently broke up with her. She's not upset though, thinks there are plenty of fish in the sea...
Symptoms Before Diagnosis: She had a constant pain in her knee that kept getting worse and worse. It would often swell up and it felt like there was a lot of liquid under the skin. Her primary care doctor had a hard time diagnosing her problem. He treated her for a variety of things, including water-on-the-knee, a ligament strain, and even cartilage deficiency (where she took supplements from a shark) before he finally decided to consider this might be cancer. Nothing else was helping, so that's he considered the possibility.
Treatments and the Effects: She had surgery on her knee, followed by chemotherapy. She didn't think the surgery was that bad, but the chemotherapy was the worst. After every session, she would vomit for hours. She was so weak she could barely hold herself up. She couldn't eat and she lost a ton of weight.
Lasting Effects from Treatments: Her knee aches sometimes when it rains because of the surgery, but doctors tell her that is pretty typical. She has a large scar on her knee, that's all really.
How Others Treated Her: Her mom was always crying and fussing over her, especially when the chemo's effects were really bad. She thinks that her mom had a really hard time dealing with her being so sick and in so much pain. Strangers often stared at her, but she says she got used to that eventually and tried to ignore it. It bugged her that her dad often seemed to try and pretend nothing was even wrong.
Current Feelings:
" As horrible as it was, I wouldn't change the experience for anything. There were a lot of blessings that came out of it. It has given me a much more optimistic outlook on life. I now laugh all the time, its really improved my sense of humor and ability to realize that things could always be worse."
"Every time I have a pain, I'm convinced its a relapse. But then I have to stop myself, calm down, and realize its probably nothing."
Future Plans:
After college she hopes to go to medical school. She wants to become a pediatrician.