Hurdler Faces Race of Her Life
by Marcia Smith, Orange County Register
January 26, 2005
She was young, just about to turn 21, and she figured she would continue with the rest of her life.
Then everything changed that day in August when doctors told Brandii Ruiz that her cancer wasn't going away.
Then time began to matter, these days and months stolen by a disease that keeps her from majoring in biology at Long Beach State and running on the 49ers track team.
This unpredictable cancer is keeping her from her life.
THE WAITING
Another Long Beach State semester started Tuesday. She should have been starting classes like the other juniors, not sitting in her Whittier home, waiting for the phone to ring and a miracle to answer.
"My entire life is on hold," said Ruiz, unnerved by each telephone ring. "I can't go back to school. I can't run. I can't even sleep because I'm so worried and anxious."
She's expecting the doctors to call and tell her whether the tumors have disappeared and the cancer - a form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma known as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma - is gone.
And she is waiting for the National Bone Marrow Donor Program Registry to call saying it has found a compatible donor for a transplant.
Until she gets those answers, she can't make any choices. Will she be able finish college? Get a job? Make New Year's resolutions? Rejoin the track team? Run another lap? Leap another hurdle?
Ruiz has had too many obstacles in her path since Nov.19, 2003, when she first learned the root of the persistent cough and the blunt and achy pain in her chest.
Her coughing wasn't asthma, as doctors believed. The pain wasn't a muscle strained during weightlifting, as the Long Beach State athletic trainers thought.
The problems came from a tumor inside her right lung. It made her cough until her eyes watered. It caused a lung to collapse, pneumonia to develop, weakness to take over.
Ruiz, who was 5-foot-8 and 142 pounds of lean muscle when she competed in the 400-meter hurdles and two sprint relays for the 49ers at the 2003 Big West meet, never thought she would be sick.
Then a doctor at Arcadia's Methodist Hospital slapped the black and white film of her chest X-ray atop a fluorescent illuminator, showing her a tumor the size of a baseball.
"It was in a lymph node, pressing against her heart and lung," recalled her father, Jorge Ruiz. "I just looked at my wife and thought, 'Cancer?,' but I didn't want to say it out loud."
Jorge Ruiz, a reserve sergeant for the Alhambra police department and an employee of the Yellow Roadway trucking company, didn't know anything about cancer - except that it killed people.
The big, mustachioed man once full of embraces and jokes grew quiet. And in his moments alone, he wanted to pray but couldn't because he was too angry to believe that any god would give illness to his first child.
"She's my clone, my No.1, so beautiful and full of life and goodness," he said. "How could this have happened?"
Jorge, along with Brandii's mother, Rose, and Brandii's youngersister, Monica, stayed with Brandii in the hospital for two weeks.
A tube, an inch in diameter, pierced the side of her chest and drained fluid from Brandii's lung. A nurse with a wheelchair came to take her for countless tests, a CAT scan and a PET scan. A biopsy soon confirmed the cancer.
"She was scared," the father said. Everyone was. And through their fear, they decided to fight, opting for two, three-day courses of potent chemotherapy.
Before the first session, Brandii went to school and called a meeting for her friends on the track team. Her coaches, Alan Sythe and assistant Kevin Galbraith, and many teammates had visited her in the hospital. She told them she had cancer and wouldn't be around for awhile.
"This is not going to stop me," she said to them, being courageous, trying to smile, then opening her arms to tear-struck teammates who promised support.
THE TREATMENT
Her father drove Brandii to Arcadia for chemotherapy. In a treatment room with two chairs, a window, a television and a clean floor that you would expect in a clinic, a needle pierced a vein in the bend of her arm.
Drugs dripped from an IV bag. Brandii closed her eyes and faded away, full of sensations, "like a thousand needles poking my head," she said.
Through the day, she also received a 24-hour dose of a cancer maintenance drug through a portacath - an intravenous catheter inserted into a large vein behind her collarbone.
The chemotherapy made it necessary for Brandii to have a PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line, a small tube providing vein access in the bend of her arm.
Her parents, who read several books to learn about cancer, became her home nurses. With latex gloves, they cleaned the PICC line with alcohol nightly. They helped her move around, save her strength.
She struggled to attend classes and keep up with her studies through sickness and nausea. She had to withdraw.
It took everything - more strength than a final kick in a race - for her to stay awake when friends and teammates visited, bearing gossip and inspirational books, like "Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul," and Lance Armstrong's cancer story, "It's Not About The Bike."
Brandii underwent six treatments in six months. Her long, thick brown hair with ends that swung near her waist fell out. Her body weakened, thinning by 15 pounds.
Last May, seven months after her diagnosis, Brandii learned the tumor was gone. The family celebrated by taking a week-long trip to Maui in June, and Brandii planned on returning to school - and her life.
But two months after they returned from Hawaii, Brandii's oncologist, Dr.Robert Shapiro, phoned Jorge Ruiz about "a spot" in the most recent test.
"I was heartbroken again," Jorge Ruiz remembered feeling. "I thought we had put it behind us."
Shortly before her 21st birthday on Aug.29, Brandii learned the tumor was growing again. It forced her to postpone her comeback, spend another three nights in the hospital and endure more chemotherapy
This time, it didn't work.
Radiation, the family hoped, would help. Jorge Ruiz drove his daughter to the USC/Norris Cancer Center for the first treatment Nov.2.
Brandii got three dots tattooed on her chest, targets for the radiation to strike for five-minute intervals, every day for 27 days.
"We don't know if it worked yet," her father said.
THE HOPE
Her hair had grown back. Her appetite has returned. Her strength is improving.
But Brandii Ruiz's body can't handle much more medicine. Doctors say she needs a bone marrow or stem cell transplant so she can undergo more chemotherapy if the tumor returns.
Last week, her father organized blood drives and bone marrow testing at his trucking company, and his police department staged one at Alhambra city hall. More than 400 donors turned out, including Brandii's track teammates and coaches.
"I couldn't believe so many came to help me," she said. "Finding a match is like winning the lottery."
So she waits, hopeful but full of questions.
"What's next? I don't know. Will it come back? I don't know. Will I be healthy again? I'm not sure. All I know is that I want to beat this," she said.
The competitive athlete manages a champion's smile. Only 21, she still has plenty of life she wants to live.
She wants to get back to her school and her friends. She wants to dance, to work out, to go out to the movies, to go shopping with her sister, Monica, 19, - without getting drowsy, to think about tomorrow.
She wants to swim more than the 10 laps in the pool at the local 24 Hour Fitness Center, without getting tired. She swims her anger out with strong strokes and a whitewater, egg-beater kick until she can swim no more.
And Brandii Ruiz wants to run as fast and as far as her body used to take her. She wants to put on those silver Asics spikes that have hung in her closet since she raced in the Big West meet that seems like forever ago.
"I miss them every day," Brandii said about her teammates.
"I miss everything," she said, about life. |
