Teacher's legacy builds bond between cancer survivor, sufferer

Melanie Camire was and - for all accounts - still is an average 20 year old. She is an honor student at Illinois State University, majoring in theater studies, and she loves Disney. So much, in fact, that the Relay for Life team in her honor bears a tie to her love for the fairy tale place. Our team name, Once Upon a Dream, is not just a phrase referring to the Sleeping Beauty movie. It is a call to arms, a call to find a cure, a dream that there will one day be a cancer-free world.

Melanie had very little indication that she was sick, short of a few odd cramps the month or so she was diagnosed, yet on the day she found out that she had a football-sized tumor growing on her left kidney she was in immense pain. A few days later she had surgery in which a few ribs were removed and she was told that she had a 50 percent chance of surviving surgery due to the size of the tumor and the tumors encompassing the main vein that supports the heart.

She did fairly well through surgery but nine of her 10 lymph nodes were found to have cancer.

Her treatment options do not include chemo or radiation; she is involved in a groundbreaking experimental study. Her type of cancer is so rare because it is a mutation of two different types of cancer found in the kidney. It is a stage 4 translocational kidney cancer. Of the few documented cases of this form of cancer, 90 percent of patients have recurrence throughout the rest of their body within one year. Most of the time, the cancer comes back with a vengence and spreads so quickly it is fatal.

Melanie is experiencing some harsh side effects of the experimental drug that is hopefully helping keep the cancer cells from regenerating in her body. She has immense pain in her limbs, can't type and finds walking difficult. Her body has broken out in a painful rash and she finds it hard to breathe. Her doctors think this medicine may be doing her more harm than good, but it is her only hope.

As president of the Willowbrook High School Alumni Association, I brought the news of Melanie's diagnosis to the board and suggested we help her financially. Melanie was a 2008 recipient of the Carol Drennan Memorial Scholarship.

Drennan was an English teacher and the theater director at Willowbrook for more than 20 years, and she impacted my life immensely. I believe that if Drennan didn't pass away five years ago at age 52, she would still be alive and teaching today. Melanie would have been one of her students, and Drennan would have done anything to help a student.

Even though Melaine never met Carol Drennan, the teacher has impacted her life not once, but twice.

Shortly after her diagnosis, I presented Melanie with a check on behalf of the Carol Drennan Memorial Scholarship for $4,500 to help with her medical bills. We believed in Melanie in 2008 when we awarded her the scholarship for talent, and we believe in her now more than ever.

A teacher can make a difference in a life, as Carol Drennan impacted mine and, now, the life of a student she never met.