Teen lives full life despite cancer

‘Think about today and not tomorrow. There is no future, just today, so you might as well live.’

ATLANTA (AP) — When the doctors told Jared Storey they had done all they could to save his life, he was “disappointed they gave up on him,” said the teenager’s mom.

“They gave up on him but he hasn’t given up. He said he’d rather die on the operating table trying than giving up.”

Recently, Jared, a former Pine Grove Middle School student and the son of Joy Hollingsworth and Jeff Storey, turned 15 years old.

He’s spent more than a year battling osteosarcoma, a type of cancer that starts in the bones.

The boy who wanted to be a basketball player was diagnosed after suffering a pain in his left leg. It was Christmas break 2016. His mom thought he’d hurt his leg playing basketball. Instead, he had osteosarcoma in his left femur.

Jared was 13 years old when his ordeal began.

He’s undergone numerous painful treatments and surgeries. He’s had a leg amputated. He’s had tumors removed from his lungs.

When the tumors continued to grow in recent weeks, they fused in and around his spine, making it almost impossible to perform surgery, Hollingsworth said.

The tumors are growing at a fast rate, causing recent paralysis from the chest down, with numbness spreading into his hands in recent days but not

Jared Storey Atlanta

enough yet, though painful, to keep him from playing video games, his mother said. The family still hopes for a special wheelchair that will support his upper body and neck.

He was placed on oxygen this past Thursday. The tumors grow, the paralysis spreads. Though he is trying a new type of treatment, the prognosis is grim. But Jared keeps smiling.

Through numerous Facebook messages posted by his mother, Jared Storey has kept smiling, laughing, hoping and dreaming out loud, no matter the surgeries, no matter the loss, no matter the bad news.

One video, a short time after his left leg was amputated, Jared hops on his right leg, dribbling a basketball around the room. Undaunted. Indomitable. Smiling.

“Think about today and not tomorrow,” Jared said. “There is no future, just today, so you might as well live.”

He’s at the family home in Atlanta now. Palliative-care workers talk to him about preparing for death.

“It’s boring and annoying,” Jared said with a mild chuckle regarding death talk.