Ryan Ruud's family knew something was wrong. The then-12-year-old with attention deficit disorder kept getting headaches and suddenly could sleep for 36 hours at a time. "That was very unusual for me," Ryan says. "I was always going."

When Ryan's doctors suggested that a nasty sinus infection might be causing the changes, his mother, a nurse, pushed for a CT scan of her son's head. When Ryan's vision became blurred and his left eye had became bloodshot, that sealed the deal.

The scan revealed a plum-size mass on the right side of Ryan's brain. Two days later, the mass was surgically removed. Doctors weren't sure what it was at the time, but biopsy results revealed that it was cancer.

Ryan's doctors warned him that the additional treatments ahead of him would be tough on his body.

"You have this horrible thing that's going to kill you if you don't do something about it, but we have this horrible thing that might help," he says. "It's really your only option."

When it's 'over'

The Roseau boy had gone from playing pond hockey and snowmobiling to having to lie still for hours for tests. Ryan hated every minute of it.

But luckily for him, he now realizes, those tests found another, smaller tumor in his brain that was underneath the first one. Instead of surgery this time, Ryan had six weeks of chemotherapy followed by six weeks of cranial radiation to kill the tumor.

Within six months of his diagnosis, Ryan was able to go home. His hair started growing back on the side of his head that wasn't irradiated, and he started to look healthier in general.

"Once you start to look a little bit better and a little bit healthier, then everything's over to them. But it's not."

Ryan recalls that people in his small community began to comment on how great it was that he beat his cancer and how great it must be to done with the whole ordeal.

"Once you start to look a little bit better and a little bit healthier, then everything's over to them," he says. "But it's not."

Dealing with late effects and anger

Ryan noticed almost immediately after his radiation treatments that he wasn't hearing as well out of his left ear. That hearing loss turned out to be permanent.

He also had problems with motor coordination. He no longer could write clearly, and walking was sometimes difficult. Those skills have come back 100 percent.

But another side effect of Ryan's cancer treatment was depression. After surviving cancer, Ryan had a hard time relating to kids his own age. And having gone through it all during the already tough adolescent years didn't help.

"I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it and say, 'Nope, it was great after I was done,'" he says. "I was really angry. Really angry.

"There are these lasting impacts—the anger, the depression, the trying to fit in, the struggling with the fact that every time I cough I think I'm going to die and people making fun of me because of that."

Ryan's doctors put him on antidepressant drugs to help. By the ninth grade, he was off the pills and moving on with his life.

"It's one of those things that you have to get through on your own," he says. "But it's getting better. … Every day it gets better for me."

Moving on with life

Today things are looking up for Ryan. At age 22, he's finishing his last year of college at St. Cloud State University and working as an on-air personality at a radio station there.

"It's helped me kind of break out of my shell," he says. "I've always been very outgoing, but I think going through all of this kind of puts you back into a shell at times, so it's also kind of healing to be able to regain some of that outgoing personality that I used to have."

Besides having what he calls "the immune system of a fruit fly," Ryan is thankful that hearing loss—which has been linked to brain radiation in research—has been the only medical late effect he has experienced after his treatment. Working in broadcast media, where hearing is a big part of his job, "I really push myself to overcome all of that," he says.

In his spare time, Ryan runs his own media design company called Random Radiance, which he says is also his philosophy on life.

"Every day we have little moments that are radiant, and it's those random radiant moments that get us through things," he says. "You have to look for the good in every day."

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The Growing Up After Cancer section of the Masonic Cancer Center Web site was produced by University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication graduate student Nicole Endres. The section's medical content was written under the advisement of Masonic Cancer Center member Joseph Neglia, M.D., M.P.H.