Cancer survivor goes back to college

By Rose Hooper

Connor

"I felt like I was coming down with a bad case of the flu... I was just so weak. I couldn't walk for 10 minutes without having to sit down," said Connor, who had always been "incredibly healthy," working out at the gym each day.

"Then one morning I was brushing my teeth when my gums starting bleeding really bad... they bled for 20 minutes... I got scared," said Connor, who was enrolled then as an exchange student in Western Carolina University's honors program.

"Our power of denial is really strong," he said, "because I just kept telling myself that it would go away. My girlfriend, Kim Bova, told me that I needed to see a doctor, and I told her to lay off, that she sounded like I had cancer."

He did have cancer - acute myelocytic leukemia - cancer of his blood-forming tissues. He flew home to North Carolina where his parents, Dale and Hope Connor, took one look at him and rushed him straight to the hospital. Doctors discovered he had no platelets or clotting agents. His bone marrow ceased to make red blood cells, so his body was filled with a high concentration of white blood cells.

Blood cells are formed in the bone marrow, the soft center of bones. Normally, blood cells are produced in an orderly, controlled way. But when leukemia develops, the body produces large numbers of abnormal blood cells.

Turns out his 16-year-old sister, Tristen, shared his same genetic make-up and was a perfect bone-marrow match.

"In fact, the doctors told me that hers would be better for me than my own," he said of his physicians at Bowman Gray.

"Everything went right; I felt very lucky," he said. "Sometimes I would really be in the pits, but then I thought I only had to go through 1/10 of what other cancer patients go through."

At times Connor even thought he had done something to deserve the disease. "I couldn't justify it in my mind," he said, "and I suffered bouts of depression, and I've never been a depressed person."

Doctors told him they had never seen such a quick recovery. He had the bone marrow transplant last December, returning home about the middle of January.

"A couple of months later I started playing racquetball and rock climbing. Generally it takes two years for your immune system to build back up, but I'm already up to 90 percent now," said Connor, who's been through two bouts of chemotherapy and full-body radiation, in addition to the bone marrow transplant.

"At 20, you never think about your own mortality," Connor said, rubbing his fresh crop of curly brown hair. "I used to believe I was in control of my life. But being diagnosed with leukemia was like having the air pulled out of my lungs."

It also jolted the belief system of this "self-convinced agnostic."

"I didn't see God, so why think about Him?" he said. "I used to be rude to those who are religious. But since all of this happened to me, in my heart I know coincidence can only go so far."

Connor, on break from his calculus class at WCU, said, "If anything, I am thankful for this disease because it really matured me. I value each day more. I'm definitely a more compassionate person...in fact, I think I am a better person."

He values his girlfriend, Kim, more, too. "Imagine, here she is, this 19-year-old from Boston, Mass., who drops out of college to spend all these months at my bedside."

The support he has received during his illness, especially from his family and the American Cancer Society, has been "simply incredible," he said.

This month the American Cancer Society awarded Connor a college scholarship for $1,000 to help him pursue his independent major combining languages and computer science.

If you are a college student, diagnosed with cancer before age 21, you are eligible for the American Cancer Society's College Scholarship. The award is for $1,000, renewable each year.

For more information, call Josh Pierce, community cancer control manager, at 631-4429.

Back to Archive: 06/28/01.