After years of classes at Children’s Hospital, girl graduates on Sunday.
Teenage cancer patient will graduate on Sunday
Life has offered too few guarantees to Amber Pflughoeft since that day nine years ago when a doctor said the pain in her knee was bone cancer.
So Sunday’s sure thing is a call for celebration. Amber, 18, will graduate with her class at West Bend West High School.
She loves how normal that sounds. Normal is dull only if you’ve never been without it.
Amber has invited her favorite teacher to commencement in the school gym, and he doesn’t even work at West Bend West. Over the past five years, Mike Trocchio has been Amber’s teacher at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, where she has spent days, weeks, even months at a time.
“He’s always just been really wonderful,” Amber told me during an interview Monday at Children’s where she and her mom, Tiffany, had come for their once or twice weekly clinic visit, a 68-mile round trip from West Bend.
“At first, I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to do schoolwork at all. But he had a passion for it that kind of grew on me, especially with history and math. Seeing him excited lifted my spirits, too.”
When Amber was in isolation, Mike would don a gown, gloves and a mask and jump into the day’s lesson. When she was too weak or tired, he would read to her or write down her words.
In his 12 years of teaching sick and injured kids at Children’s Hospital — sometimes for a day or two and sometimes for years — this is the first time he was invited to a graduation ceremony where tickets are often scarce. He’ll be there for this student who became a friend.
“I’ve worked with her close to 260 school days over the course of five years, quite a bit her freshman year and junior year. This year, she hasn’t been inpatient very much, which is good, but I still see her in the clinic,” Mike said.
He works for the Wauwatosa School District, which provides four full-time teachers and an aide who saw 1,500 students last year at the hospital.
Since she got sick, Amber’s attendance at elementary, middle and high school has been spotty, and her fatigue kept it to a couple hours at a time. She has received instruction at home and this year in an alternative West Bend classroom under the GED Option program for students behind on their credits.
But she and her mother praise the hospital’s school program with helping her keep up. Amber and Mike worked together on math, history, science, honors English and advanced placement government and politics. They made sure Amber could pass tests and quizzes.
“Without the school program here, she would not be graduating. It would be another year, maybe two,” said Tiffany, who works evenings and nights cleaning motorcoaches. She has another child, Ayden. He’s 9.
Amber missed out on the socialization that comes with school, but she developed friendships at Camp One Step for kids with cancer. She missed prom every year at West Bend West, but enjoyed the proms Children’s Hospital puts on every year.
Amber was in fifth grade when a pillow fight with friends left her in a surprising amount of leg pain. It took a couple months, but doctors discovered she had stage 4 osteosarcoma, bone cancer that spread to her lungs and later to her diaphragm.
The years that followed are a blur of chemotherapy and other drugs, a bone marrow transplant, surgery, broken bones, steroids, hair loss, complications and side effects. For a year or so she was in remission, but the cancer returned.
She doesn’t think in terms of how long she’s got left.
“They don’t know. We don’t know. It’s been that way for a long time, and it can still be like that for a long time,” she said with tears in her eyes.
Right now she’s concentrating on high school graduation. “I’m feeling really proud. I didn’t know if I would make it past freshman year.”
Amber hopes to tackle college next and get into medical research on alternatives to chemotherapy with fewer side effects. She also has started painting again, favoring landscapes.
Tiffany likes to compare her daughter’s education to days of old, with her hospital room serving as a one-room schoolhouse. Amber benefited from the one-on-one learning experience with Mike.
“I’ve had opportunities I never would have had,” Amber said, “and I’ve met amazing people.”