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>> You hear about breast cancer
and you hear about colon cancer,
but you don't really hear about sarcomas
and I just thought that this would be a good way
of touching the lives of others while spreading my story.
>> Cancer can feel helpless,
so being able to do little things
also gives you, I think, a sense of empowerment.
>> It does.
I first noticed the lump at volleyball camp.
I looked down to my left
and there was something protruding from my leg.
My mom had this immediate bad feeling about it.
July 2nd, a year ago, I had my tumor resected
and they sent it to pathology
and my orthopedist realized that it was most likely cancer.
My mom decided that she wanted to take me
to a sarcoma center because she wanted me
to receive the best treatment possible.
>> When we were driving up, we actually received the results
of her PET scan that had been done locally,
so we knew that it hadn't spread.
That was a big relief,
but to come up and meet with three of the top specialists
in sarcoma and hearing three separate people
across the discipline give the same recommendation
filled us with a lot of confidence.
>> How are you? >> Good, how are you?
>> When Laini first came to visit us,
she had already had surgery at an outside center
and we had already had an outside pathology report
that showed that she had what was fortunately
a low grade soft tissue sarcoma of the thigh.
We elected, given its low grade nature and her young age,
to try to avoid radiation.
Given the fact that there were no other sites in her body,
we thought that she would be best treated
with what's called a wide local re-excision,
taking out the prior tumor bed and the prior surgical bed
to try to get better margins around the tissue.
She had also presented with a fluid collection in the area
that we wanted to remove in case there were any tumor cells
that might've been left behind.
>> I would say, from our perspective surgery day,
he did a fantastic job just addressing everything
that we had talked about in pre-surgery
and he was able to cut out the first scar completely
and have enough tissue to do internal stitches.
And I'll never forget, he said he was gonna
do his best to do that
because she was a 14 year old girl and she deserved it.
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>> I just wanted to do something that can impact someone
and hope is a small word, but a big meaning.
>> Laini just celebrated her first anniversary
of being tumor free.
We're super excited for her.
Her scans have all come back clean.
We're gonna be following Laini for several years
and I look forward to a prolonged time
of seeing nothing on her scans.
>> Here's my scar and the fluid accumulation
has gone down and it's faded a lot
since the original surgeries.
>> They kept her three days in the hospital
and we drove home, she started high school eight days
after her surgery, started with half days and on crutches.
It had only been about two months since her second surgery
and she decided to try out for travel volleyball team
and she didn't expect to make the team at all
and she just said, I'm just gonna try out because I can
and there are kids that can't.
And somehow, just pushed herself, really, really tried hard,
and was able to get a position.
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