wrong. When he’d hit the floor after diving for a ball, his leg would hurt a ridiculous amount. Doctors discovered a fast-growing tumor in his leg – “The size of two iPhones stacked on top of each other,” he says – and quickly determined that he would need surgery.
Petra got the news first. Tim had a rare and aggressive form of cancer known as synovial sarcoma. She broke it to him after he woke up from his biopsy, and she says his optimism kicked in almost immediately. “I think he cried for about 10 seconds, and then he said, ‘I can beat this,’” she says. “That’s always been his attitude. ‘I can beat this.’”
Maybe it’s just the way Tim is wired, but even as cancer continues to throw major chal- lenges his way, he finds it almost impossible to look at things from anything other than a glass-is-half-full perspective. That was true from the start. When doctors told him five years ago that his cancer was Stage 3, his parents were understandably upset. Tim’s reaction was different.
“I was happy because it wasn’t Stage 4,” he says. “I was 13 at the time. I didn’t realize how bad it was. But I knew there was a way to look positive at it. [Being positive] is the only way to go with your life.”
N
ot surprisingly, after the surgery to remove that first tumor, Vorenkamp
didn’t pay much attention when doctors told him he’d never play volleyball again. They’d taken out a big chunk of muscle in his leg, so it was reasonable to think that he might have to drop out of a jumpers’ sport. But that wasn’t the way he saw it. Volleyball was big in his life, and it had been for a year and a half, ever since he’d made the switch from basketball after the volleyball coach at his middle school told him, “We don’t have enough players. We need a middle blocker.” Vorenkamp grew to love it in a hurry, and he was already thinking long term about playing in high school and college and maybe someday taking a shot at the professional level. He wasn’t going to let cancer interrupt his plans.
“I knew right away I was going to play again,” he says. Three weeks after he was done with the chemotherapy that followed the surgery, “I was back on the volleyball court – just to prove them wrong.” By then, it was spring of 2011, and he had traveled a rough road. The chemo process began with surgery to put a port underneath his skin. “I hated it,” he says. “I felt like the terminator.” But it provided an entry point for the medication. The stuff he was taking was too strong for a vein, so the port was required
to take it directly to an artery. For the next six months, he’d go to the hospital for chemo treatment four days every three weeks and sit in a hospital room as a continuous drip flowed into his bloodstream. “I wouldn’t eat at all for those four days,” he says. “Every time I smelled food, I would just throw up. I would go home Sunday, and around Wednesday or Thursday I would start eating again. So I wouldn’t eat for a whole week. I would lose, like, 20 pounds, and then I would try to gain it back before starting treatment.”
The thing is, Vorenkamp was just the opposite of miserable during those tough months.
“It sounds weird, but it was the happiest time in my life. I got really close to my fam- ily and my friends, and we found joy in the little things.”
And he retained his sense of humor. One time, when his blood counts were way out of whack and he had to be hospitalized and hooked up to IVs, he wrote this in his blog: “The next day and a half consisted of eat, sleep, drinking and going to the bathroom. I felt like a dog because they do pretty much the same thing … but their whole life!”
ecause of the treatments, he missed most of his eighth grade school year, but based on the straight A’s he’d gotten in honors classes as a seventh-grader, the ad- ministration at his middle school agreed that he should be allowed to graduate on time and begin his fresh- man year at JSerra High with his class. By then, he was 6-3. In one year, he’d shot up more than half a foot. This, despite the fact that doctors told him the medication would likely slow his growth. In volleyball, he switched from middle blocker to setter, and by the end of his sophomore year, he landed a roster spot in the USA Boys’ Select Program. But that summer, while he was walking down the stairs to the beach on his way to go surfing, he suddenly felt a massive abdominal pain. Doctors found that his lung was collapsed, caused by another cancerous tumor. The lung had been deflated for a full three days while Vorenkamp carried on with his usual activi- ties, including surfing and volleyball. When he heard the diagnosis, he hoped doctors would give him clearance to delay treatment until he could compete with the
B
USA Select Team, but it was decided that he needed surgery right away. That was a tough one. Really tough. But his big-picture optimism didn’t fade. He made this comment to his mom after the diagnosis: “One more opportunity to prove that I can beat cancer.”
hile Tim was in the hospital for treat- ment his eighth-grade year, Petra often stayed overnight with him. She still has a vivid memory of something he said on one of those nights. “I don’t know what God’s plans are for me,” he told her, “but I know he wants to use me to motivate others.” “I will never forget that moment,” she says. “It wasn’t something you hear a teen- ager say. But I think he wants to show people that, no matter what you face, you have so much strength that you don’t even know you have. He wants to share that you need to stay positive and set goals and look into the future and not linger on what has happened.” It’s an attitude he carries with him in all areas of his life. After Make-A-Wish Founda- tion funded his four-day trip to the 2012 Lon- don Olympics, where he cheered on the USA volleyball teams and got to know players like Clay Stanley and Reid Priddy and watched Usain Bolt win gold in the 100 meters, he decided he wanted to give back. During the next two years, he gave speeches about his Make-A-Wish experience at corporations and on college campuses and raised tens of thou- sands of dollars for the foundation, including
W
“I think he cried for about 10 seconds, and then he said, ‘I can beat this.’ That’s always been his
attitude. ‘I can beat this.’” Petra Vorenkamp, after telling her son he had an aggressive form of cancer
nearly $19,000 at one event called the Walk For Wishes.
“I can still see the smile on his face,” Pe- tra says. “It was incredible to experience that people were so motivated to help Tim grant wishes for other children. And going to the Olympics … it’s hard to describe what that does to a cancer patient; it gives you such a boost in hope and changes your life. I hear that from every Wish family.”
A
s for volleyball, the play and energy he brought to the court was clearly inspirational, even for those who didn’t know
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