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Story from Liyue: August 2003

My name is Liyue. I am a sixteen-year-old girl going into my junior year of high school. I have been an osteosarcoma survivor for about four years. I was first diagnosed when I was twelve-years-old.

I remember that it was the jump-roping part of seventh grade P.E. and I was unable to jump because of a worsening pain in my upper right tibia. My mom took me to see the doctor and after a variety of X-rays, MRIs, CT scans, and biopsies, doctors at UCLA determined that I had bone cancer.

I don't believe I will ever be able to truly describe what it felt like when I found out that I had cancer. It was a beautiful summer afternoon. The cool Santa Monica breeze brushed my face as I left the UCLA medical center. The sky was high and blue and cotton clouds hung gently overhead. I felt like I was walking in a dream. Everywhere, I saw people walking about, laughing, talking, eating, enjoying their day. I wondered if anyone else had received the blow that had just been dealt me. I didn't know if cancer meant I was going to die very soon.

Before I had time to realize it, I was taken out of school and placed on a grueling chemotherapy regimen. Within weeks, my head of thick black hair disappeared and I was bald. I screamed the first time I saw myself in the mirror after the last strand was gone. I couldn't recognize myself. All I saw was a horrible face gaping at me, so constricted and pale that I would rather have died than admit I was the person I saw.

Eventually, I did get used to my new life. I could not go to school anymore, barely saw any of my friends. Of course, I didn't want to see any of my friends knowing that they would be shocked at my appearance. I studied at home, read my books, and did my homework, staying caught up with my classmates so I would be ready to return to school at any time.

The chemo had made me so weak that I could not stand immediately after treatments. Two limb-salvage surgeries crippled me and left my right leg so misshaped that I cried just to see the thick purple scar that ran from ankle to thigh. Doctors comforted me that a decade ago, everyone with osteosarcoma underwent amputation and that I was lucky to even have my leg.

Unfortunately, the disease recurred locally in my freshman year of high school. I had just started attending classes again, hoping that high school would provide me a new beginning. Two weeks into the school year, my doctors confirmed that an earlier biopsy from my right leg proved to be positive for recurrent osteosarcoma. The unanimous decision of the cancer board at UCLA was above-knee amputation. I found this out on September 10, 2001. On September 11, I was brooding about my future during History class when hi-jacked planes brought down the two WTC towers and another crashed into the Pentagon. On September 14, I lost my right leg from the knee down. That was perhaps the worst week of my life.

It has been two years from that week. I wear a prosthetic leg that makes it possible for me to walk. I am grateful that I live in a country where I can still lead a fairly normal life despite being an amputee. However, I cannot do many of things I used to do before my diagnosis. I used to love sports. Basketball, soccer, tennis, rollerblading, gymnastics- I loved them all. However, my passion was track and field. In middle school, I won the gold medals in the girls' 100 meter dash and the mile. I took home the silvers for high jump and 400 meter relay. Though I might have changed my mind eventually, I used to dream of being some kind of professional athlete. It has been difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that I cannot climb stairs, cannot run, cannot jump, cannot dance. I wait for the day when prosthetic technology will maybe allow me to regain a few of these things, but as of now, I am more concerned with keeping myself cancer free, since I have just had a metastatic recurrence in my lung a few months ago. Though I am a survivor, I am sick of losing whole chunks of my life because osteosarcoma demands that I sacrifice so much. Every check-up is so nerve-wracking because I know that one telltale nodule on my CT scans can mean months more of treatment. My hope is that no other boy or girl will have to suffer the losses that I have suffered. I pray for better treatment options that will not devastate the body and mind so much. Better yet, I pray for the cure so that osteosarcoma will no longer take away so much from its victims.