Surviving Cancer Just the First Step for Teen Amputee

Jason Garstkiewicz has scored plenty of lacrosse goals in his young life, but one he scored last season for his Haddonfield travel team, during his his first game back after a shocking ordeal, counted just a little bit more.

In a span of just 10 months he had not only survived cancer, but also survived the loss of his right foot and a good portion of his leg.

“Watching him play that day was remarkable,” his father, Gary Garstkiewicz, said. “Being someone who played sports his whole life, watching him play is just what we do, but sometimes you lose the impact of the fact he is doing it with prosthesis. He doesn’t look that different than he did before all of this. Scoring a goal that first game was great because it allowed him to see he can do it, can keep him moving forward.”

And he has. After climbing back from the cancer and amputation, Jason will mark May 31 as the one-year anniversary of the end of his treatments.

"I hadn't really thought about that," Jason said Tuesday about the anniversary. "I've kind of forgotten about any anything that happened last year. Things have been moving so fast in school and with sports."

Jason, 14, said he feels great—"like a normal kid again." He plans to try out for the Haddonfield Memorial High School football team in the fall as a freshman.

Pam Garstkiewicz said the prospect of her son playing high school football, just  over a year after he was bald from several rounds of chemotherapy and weighed only 120 pounds, scares her.

But she said she supports Jason, who is now 6-foot-2, 165 pounds and has a full head of hair. She feels his story will inspire others.

"He's living his life like nothing ever happened, which is kind of the best thing you could hope for in such a situation."

It started suddenly

Jason's ordeal all started with an innocent looking bump.

On Dec. 27, 2011, he returned home from a basketball practice complaining that his right ankle hurt. His parents didn’t think much about it at the time. As a 13-year-old who is 6 feet tall and wears a size 14 shoe, such pains were commonplace.

However, after taking a shower Garstkiewicz noticed a bump on his leg down by the ankle.

“It was nothing crazy, so we thought maybe it was a stress fracture,” his father said.

Soon after, Garstkiewicz underwent tests that revealed the bump was a cancerous tumor.

That was only the beginning of the bad news.

“We went to CHOP (the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) for a biopsy and it slowly evolved to not only being cancer, but the best course of action for it was amputation,” said Gary. “That was almost as hard to hear as the cancer diagnosis.”

Suddenly, a teenager who spent his life enjoying football, basketball and lacrosse with friends was faced with the possibility of having all of that and more taken away.

The family got advice from many in the local community who had endured the same issues. Gary recalled receiving a letter from a man a few blocks down whose godson had cancer in the lower leg. The man told him that repeated surgeries were done to help save the limb, but nothing worked and the boy sadly passed.

Countless doctors and surgeons also told him that the smartest thing to do was to go forward with amputation.

However, Gary and his wife Pam couldn’t begin to find a way to break the news to their son.

“When it became evident that it was the best course of action to take, my wife and I were struggling on how to tell him that,” Gary said. “Jason had already taken the cancer news pretty well considering the news, and I was at a loss how to tell him.”

Fortunately for Gary and his wife, a doctor at Johns Hopkins brought up the difficult news for them. Jason was understandably shaken, if for only a short time.

“She gave him options and he was a little emotional in the room for awhile, but by the time we got home that night he was on the Internet looking at prosthetics and what people who have them can do,” Gary said. “It was remarkable how easy he accepted it.”

If there was any good news to be found at the time it was that the amputation was several inches below the knee, leaving him an important joint in terms of future movement. Jason had the amputation surgery on March 7, 2012, and followed up with two rounds of chemotherapy.

Then came the prosthetic

It wasn’t long before Jason was being fitted for an Ossur prosthetic and returning to Haddonfield Middle School on a regular basis. A few months later, he was already eager to get back into some competition. Jason and Gary began playing golf together a few rounds in the summer. That’s when Gary realized that nothing was going to hold his son back from getting back to the sports he loved.

“I don’t think in our wildest dreams would we imagine nine months into it he would be playing lacrosse again,” Gary said. “Young people don’t get held back by what they can or can’t do. They just want to do this or do that. I was hesitant about him playing at first, not knowing how much he would be able to do, but by that time he was already playing football and Frisbee with friends.”

So Gary and Pam allowed Jason to once again compete in lacrosse—a sport notorious for a level of physicality. In his games this past season, Jason looked comfortable, confident and happy knowing he is back where he feels he belongs.

"People like me can be the same as everyone else out there," Jason said. "They just have to give them the same chances. Life for everyone who went through what I went through gets easier and easier."

For more on Jason’s journey, see: