When Shari VanPuyvelde started feeling pain in her right hip, the then-10-year-old gymnast's parents thought she had probably just pulled a muscle. But then the pain started feeling more intense—so intense that she couldn't sleep at night.

An MRI later showed a type of bone tumor called Ewing's sarcoma on her hip. Shari's doctors started her on chemotherapy the following weekend.

But as a fifth-grader, it was difficult for her to understand what was happening.

"My parents would explain to me that I had cancer, but I didn't know what cancer was," says Shari, who is now 22 years old. "I could tell by my parents' reactions, by my doctors' reactions, by people around me, that it wasn't something that was going to be just lickety split, easy to deal with. They tried to explain it to me the best they could, but it's hard to understand something that big when you're so little."

Rebuilding healthy cells

Over the next couple of years, Shari and her family became very familiar with the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital.

There Shari had chemotherapy for about a year and—instead of surgery, which doctors feared might jeopardize the use of her leg—six weeks of radiation to shrink the tumor.

"My parents would explain to me that I had cancer, but I didn't know what cancer was. I could tell by my parents' reactions, by my doctors' reactions, by people around me, that it wasn't something that was going to be just lickety split, easy to deal with. They tried to explain it to me the best they could, but it's hard to understand something that big when you're so little."

The chemo Shari got was intended "to kill basically everything," she says. So on January 7, 1998, Shari had a stem cell transplant using her own stem cells that had been harvested months earlier to help rebuild healthy cells in her body.

"My parents call it my second birthday because it's like being born again," she says.

Being her own best advocate

Now, more than a decade out from her last day of cancer treatment, Shari is feeling good, although she deals with a few late effects. Because stem cell transplants can stunt one's growth, she took growth hormone for a couple of years, which helped her grow from 4'11" to 5'1".

The type of chemotherapy Shari received has led to diminished lung function, as well. "When I go running in the morning, I get way short of breath easier than anyone else my age would because of the chemotherapy," she says. "It's not that I'm not in shape—my lungs just can't handle it. It's like having asthma."

The chemo she had also has been linked to heart damage, so at her annual visit to the Long-Term Follow-Up Clinic, she gets an echocardiogram and chest x-ray to monitor for early signs of heart problems.

In addition to a yearly lung test, she sometimes gets a CT scan and bone density test to help monitor for other late effects.

And if she has health-related questions that come up between appointments, she e-mails the clinic's nurse coordinator, Nancy Youngren, R.N.

"Shari has been doing an excellent job in transitioning from a pediatric patient to a proactive young adult," Youngren says. "She assumes responsibility for her health care and asks very thoughtful questions about her health and her health history."

A shared experience

But Shari's late effects aren't holding her back. She's finishing up her bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and just got her "dream job" as an oncology nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire.

"I could not love it any more," she says with a huge smile. "I absolutely loved the nurses that I had. … So after I was done with treatment, I decided that I wanted to be an oncology nurse and do exactly what they did."

People often ask her how she can handle working with such ill patients every day. "After having gone through it, it's easy," Shari says. "I can relate to the patients so well … You can be like, 'I know what it's like.'"

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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.