Meeting the challenge
Whether or not they have a strong support network, all teenage cancer patients must face the challenge of missing large portions of school. Some, like Jones, have tutors who bring them assignments when they are in the midst of treatments that require hospitalization or keep them at home. Others, like Karp, have friends deliver work and try to catch up during free periods on those days they feel well enough to attend classes.
Alex McCarthy-Donovan, 20, a plastic anemia patient and aspiring opera singer, had a novel solution when his hair started falling out in clumps. He gave himself a "Mohawk" haircut.
Returning to school without her shoulder-length brown hair was another challenge Karp had to face. "The first day I went back I wasn't bald yet, but I had already cut my hair real short because the doctors said it was easier for my treatment," she recalls. "I saw a lot of my friends, and when they hugged me I started crying. By Thanksgiving my hair was coming out in clumps, so I just shaved it."
She never found a wig that felt comfortable, so Karp bought a variety of colored scarves that matched different outfits. During her first month of intense chemotherapy sessions, she also found she had to give up performing with the town's color guard after 10 years. "That was real hard," she says, "but they said they would hold my place for me."
Karp was not the only member of the freshman class at Beverly High relegated to the sidelines in this manner. Brendan Smith, a 15-year-old preparing for his first season as a quarterback on Beverly's junior varsity football team, went to the doctor complaining of exhaustion the day after a late-summer scrimmage and was told he had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He spent the next two months in Children's Hospital, and the closest he came to action that season was holding the ball his teammates signed for him.
Still, displaying the fortitude mirrored by many teenagers in his situation, Smith was only briefly discouraged. "At first I was in denial, but by the end of the first day I was saying, 'Let's get down to business,'" he explains. "The way I look at it, I'm in the second inning of the first game of a doubleheader. I've got a long way to go, but I'm not going to quit."
"If you have a bad attitude, the problems are still going to be there, so being positive makes things a lot easier."
— Alex McCarthy-Donovan
Three months into his treatment, Smith had already accepted that he would have to forgo the football season as well as his position as a point guard on Beverly's basketball squad. Catching for the baseball team in the spring, however, was still a possibility. "I'm hoping to make varsity," he said in December. "The docs say my port (a special intravenous line providing easy access during chemotherapy treatment) may come out in March, and it will come out in March. I'll be ready for the baseball season."
As much as they can, teenagers forced to deal with cancer try to maintain control over their lives. Alex McCarthy-Donovan of Hopedale, Mass., had to give up soccer when he was diagnosed with aplastic anemia during his junior year at Hopedale Jr./Sr. High, but he managed to come back as a team captain the following year and graduated ninth in his class in 1998. The next fall he suffered a relapse and was scheduled for a bone marrow transplant in the spring, but he held off the procedure and drove in to Dana-Farber for weekly blood transfusions so he could finish his freshman year at Westfield State College.
"If you have a bad attitude, the problems are still going to be there, so being positive makes things a lot easier," says 20-year-old McCarthy-Donovan, who spent more than six months in isolation after his transplant. This meant he also had to avoid crowds and wear a surgical mask whenever he left home to prevent infection. "I want to get back to school, I want to be with my friends, and I want to pursue my career goal of being a musician. I just accept the situation and hope for the best."
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