Girl walking again as she fights sarcoma

Christy Standler walks slowly down the hallway at Primary Children's Medical Center, hands firmly clutching a walker. In the exercise room, she strains to lift her arms to catch a big ball tossed gently by her occupational therapist.

It's not what the 12-year-old from Cedar City expected to be doing with the new year.

It is also far more than even medical experts thought she could accomplish. Many of them doubted she'd walk again.

Christy has Ewing's sarcoma, an aggressive cancer that can settle most anywhere in the body. Her tumor's location hid the disease for a long time.

It was on her spine but not in the back where it might be noticed as it put out new nodules. It grew inside her, from her spine into her chest cavity, where a golf-ball-size chunk pressed against her heart's aortic arch. It was not until a smaller segment grew in the spinal canal, pressing on the spinal cord, that she started having trouble walking.

Even then, it was at first chalked up to adolescent klutziness.

And the timing of the symptoms' onset didn't help with diagnosis, either. The girl started complaining of back pain right after she and her mother, Dr. Nancy Standler, had been riding roller coasters. Her back looked normal, and her mother, a pathologist, thought she'd twisted it a little. The fact that hot showers and a couple of ibuprofen soothed the pain seemed to confirm it.

One day, though, she fell off her platform shoes. They blamed the shoes. The next day, in regular shoes, she was having trouble. "Heel, toe, heel, toe," her mom said she gently nagged.

She wanted to sleep a lot, but that wasn't anything particularly new. And a girl her age is often dramatic when pushed to do things she doesn't feel like doing. So her mom wasn't too worried.

Big trouble

Until, that is, the day she could hardly stand and barely walk. She had little leg strength to get into the car.

Doctors in the Dixie Regional Medical Center emergency room in St. George, one of two hospitals where Standler works as a pathologist, found her leg muscles were very weak. Testing showed a tumor in the front of the spine, midway down the chest. And a collapsed vertebrae, most likely from when she fell.

She was transferred to Primary Children's Medical Center, where a succession of experts from various specialties were consulted.

The tumor, if that's what it was, was big trouble. It was in a terrible location to remove. And it required an odd combination of special skills. Pediatric neurosurgeons don't usually do chests. Cardiologists do, but they don't deal much with the spine. And so on.