When I ran into Katrina Stringari in front of The Hawk, she was wearing long, puffy jacket and a headband with Pikachu smiling on the side of her head.
She greeted me with a wave and I smiled at her before I grabbed my dinner. Even though she seemed tired, Katrina expressed her excitement for our interview in an hour. Aspiring actress, gamer, and proud Hufflepuff, Katrina has been my good friend since last year. Whenever we met, our conversations inevitably strayed to anime, Marvel, and anything related to geek culture. And if we weren't talking about geek culture, Katrina and I might touch on what we thought was wrong with the world. It was as if we had known each other longer than a year.
I kept forgetting that Katrina, who is bubbly and an all-around sweetheart, went through cancer.
"Well," Katrina started, "I suppose the best place to begin would be when it showed up."
We were sitting in my room. Katrina sat on my chair, on top of the jackets and scarves hanging over it, and told me her story.
Katrina was still in 7th grade when she became the subject of bullying. To release her anger, she swam for hours until she came home with a bump on the back of her right knee. Her mother assumed she tore a ligament and put ice on it. It didn't go away. Katrina and her mother drove to see her pediatrician to check her knee. "My pediatrician says, 'Wait here.' Walks out and comes back with the oncologist, the cancer doctor. The oncologist says, 'Well, it's probably just the Baker Cyst, but I'm not familiar with it. I would like to get a second opinion."
A week after second opinions, including a drive to a doctor in South San Francisco, they were convinced her bump was a Baker Cyst. They got a call from the San Francisco doctor to have a biopsy. In early February, the doctor called and said the bump on her knee was a tumor. It was cancer.
Katrina let out a nervous laugh. "Me being a, uh, a little twelve year old, who didn't know what the hell was going on, the only problem I had with it was: am I gonna lose my hair?"
She wasn't the first family member to be diagnosed with cancer. Her aunt and uncle died from cancer.
The reality of cancer did not hit her immediately. It wasn't until she was asked to announce to her class that she had Synovial Sarcoma, cancer of soft tissue, and would no longer attend classes that the idea of her illness – of being sick and not knowing when she would die – really struck her.
"I remember I started crying in front of the class because it just hit me then. It was scary." Katrina described facing cancer as "a hard reality" after her realization. "Thinking back on those emotions is still hard."
When she entered the hospital, Katrina wasn't able to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, especially salads, because of bacteria. The first week of treatment, her doctors tried to use a new type of chemotherapy that was supposed to target her cancer specifically. It did not work. Doctors told her parents they would go back to an older type that targets her whole body instead of giving the option to cut her leg.
Katrina steadily looked me in the eyes. "So basically my parents had been given the choice of either telling the doctors to take off my leg or poison me."
During her treatment, doctors put two tubes in her chest through her neck which stopped her from swimming. "It was an annoyance because I was pretty much a water baby," Katrina reminisced, "I love being in the water, and all of the sudden everything was taken away from me. I was so very limited with what I could do."
As Katrina continued chemotherapy, her family had to move to a one-story house because she could only use crutches and couldn't find the energy to climb up the stairs. Every week in treatment, she would go home and not get sick. Katrina had to get shots on her arms. She went through nine months of treatment and took medicine that tasted like rotten bananas. Her journey to end cancer continued with a trip to Stanford, to start radiation and physical therapy. She had to go through radiation for three months. The doctors believed that she would not be able to walk again. Katrina proved them wrong by practicing and working hard to be able to walk.
After many treatments and radiation, Katrina overcame her cancer. She was able to go home and reunite with her classmates. However, she still worried her cancer might come back, "Cancer is a never ending battle. I have to live every single day knowing that one day it will return. I might not be as lucky next time."
Despite her worries, Katrina was able to stand up in front of her bullies. Her fight against cancer gave her strength to become the woman she is today. She is currently the team captain of Relay For Life's Hogwarts United and is majoring in theater at Southern Oregon University. What kept Katrina fighting was her mother's support and reading the sixth Harry Potter book. "I think I wanted to know how it ended. I cannot die here. I got to know how it ends!" She also credits playing the game Kingdom Hearts as a source of her strength. It made her into a gamer and, like Harry Potter, she wanted to know the ending. "I think in a way, that compels me today. I need to know what happens next."
Today Katrina is stronger than before. Katrina will continue to fight as her story continues.
For more information, visit Relay For Life on how you can help raise awareness to fight cancer. If you would like to donate, please go to our Relay For Life page, Hogwarts United, and donate to our team.
Full interview with Katrina Stringari coming soon.
