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April 24, 2012

Cancer interrupts hoops plans

Jeff Kaley The Duncan Banner

DUNCAN — When she was a 16-year-old member of the 2005 basketball team at Sapulpa High School, Carrie Seely thought she had a plan for the immediate future.

“I was going to play basketball at Oklahoma State,” Seely said over the weekend when she addressed the Stephens County Relay for Life Survivors’ Celebration Dinner. “That’s what I had planned, but things changed for me when I started getting weak and tired.”

Cancer, it seems, had another plan for Carrie Seely.

Although initial testing showed nothing wrong, as the basketball season progressed, Seely couldn’t shake the periods of exhaustion, and during a second examination “they felt two lumps on my back,” she said.

A biopsy determined the “lumps” were malignant tumors, and Seely suddenly went from battling for rebounds and loose balls on the hardwood to a battle to stay alive that continues seven years later.

It’s been a roller-coaster ride for Seely. At the outset, chemo and radiation therapy seemed to have worked and at one point she received a cancer-free diagnosis.

“I went back to high school and the doctors had said there was only a five percent chance the cancer would come back,” she said. “But it wasn’t very long before it did come back, and I had to go to Texas and have my own bone marrow transplanted.

“I went from 126 pounds to weighing 85, and I spent 56 days in the hospital.”

After returning home and then having another round of hospital treatment, Seely appeared to be making progress, enough so that she was able to graduate from Sapulpa High in 2007.

At that point, Seely had a new plan — but it, too, proved short-lived.

“I wanted to go to school and become a nurse for cancer kids,” she said, “but then I had a brain seizure and they diagnosed me with having brain cancer.”

Once again, Seely went through new rounds of chemo and radiation, although this time she wasn’t fighting only for her life. She was nine weeks pregnant and cancer doctors “told me there was a good chance the baby wouldn’t make it and I wouldn’t make it. Giving up the baby was the hardest thing I’ve had to do.”

Like many who volunteer to be part of the American Cancer Society’s “Heroes of Hope” program, Seely has made numerous visits to events like the Survivor’s Celebration Dinner. Sharing her story is cathartic for Seely.  

“I was 21 when I was diagnosed with brain cancer and I’m 23 now,” she noted. “I went to the Cancer Center of America and they said the tumor is still there but the cancer is not active anymore.

“I feel very lucky.”

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