HARRISVILLE, Weber County — "Is your music an iTunes download?" "Will you sign my backpack?" "You're amazing!"

Students at Harrisville's Orion Junior High School first gave a guest performer a standing ovation during a recent assembly, then swarmed him afterward.

No, it wasn't an "American Idol" contestant but someone even better.

Matt Pond, 38, learned he had brain cancer in May of 2006. He remembers thinking, "Cancer? You don't understand. … I'm going to school, have a family, I'm working and I don't have time for cancer. Maybe in 30 years or so I'll be ready for it, but right now, I don't have time for this."

Almost three years and three surgeries later, after enduring rigorous chemotherapy and radiation regimes, losing his motor skills and reasoning (he had to learn to walk, talk, write and drive again) the vision in his right eye (which he's since regained), and going through a divorce, Pond is still grateful for his cancer.

He gives back by performing his "If I Only Had a Brain" show at school assemblies, youth conferences and firesides in Utah and Idaho and by serving on the Huntsman Cancer Institute's Patient Education Steering Committee in Salt Lake City. His message is relayed through a combination of storytelling, singing, guitar playing, pictures, jokes and humor.

"This is life and we're going to have good and bad days, but regardless, be the very best you can and do the very best you can," he tells students and anyone else who will listen.

Pond, the second youngest of 14 children, was raised in Idaho Falls, and is from a tightly knit musical family. He and his siblings performed in Michael McLean's Forgotten Carols. His oldest brother, Ron, died in 1992 at age 42 from bone cancer three months after being diagnosed. He left a wife and six children. (His youngest was just 5 months old.)

Fourteen years later, it was Matt Pond's turn to battle cancer.

Pond was your typical father of three, a master woodworker who likes to play basketball, write songs and perform in music theater — that is until he started having to sit down for a couple of minutes here and there and after discovering that big words would come to his mind, but weren't coming out of his mouth.

"I was like, 'Man, what is this?' "

Simply thinking he was overworking himself, Pond continued attending night classes at Boise State to finish his degree, putting down wood floors and jumping on the trampoline with his boys.