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156 of 728 DOCUMENTS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
May 14, 2007 Monday
Correction Appended
THIRD EDITION
JV tennis, all-world courage For St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra,
playing on a team means much more than it does to most students. It made him
a winner before he ever played a match.
BYLINE: Story by Brian Sumers Photos by J.B. Forbes St. Louis Post-Dispatch
SECTION: SPORTS; Pg. B1
LENGTH: 1947 words
The routine never changes.
Each night, just before bed, Diane Zandstra opens the door to her son Chris' room and sits on his bed. He hits the mute
button on the remote, and the two pray.
"Thank you, God," they say, "for another day."
Then Diane sprinkles holy water on her son. First on his forehead. Then his right knee. Then his stomach. If Chris has
coughed that day, she drops water on his chest.
Chris is 15, long past the age at which mothers tuck in their children at night. But he is OK with it, because he does not
want the cancer to return. He wants to continue playing junior varsity tennis and managing the football team at SLUH.
He wants to continue his life.
The doctors tell Diane her son is special. Chris has battled three primary cancers. Not one cancer that returned three
times. Three different cancers.
First came cancer of the nervous system, found when he was a baby. Then bone cancer at 12. And in July - just when all
seemed OK - liver cancer.
"It is almost impossible," said Dr. Riad Salem, his physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and one of
the 32 doctors Chris said he has visited. "Multiple cancers like this are very rare, especially in a child."
Yet through all of his sicknesses and treatments - even the amputation of his right leg below the knee - sports have
provided comfort for Chris. After he lost his leg in sixth grade, he played soccer again the next fall, taking the field with
a titanium leg and an awkward gait. When he whacked an opposing player with his leg, he'd squeal, "I'm sorry, not my
fault."
So even now, between trips to Chicago for an experimental liver cancer treatment, Chris plays tennis. He is not great,
but his junior varsity coach said he's deserving of a roster spot. And when he's joking around on the tennis court or

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JV tennis, all-world courage For St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra, playing on a team means much more than
it does to most students. It made him a winner before he ever played a match. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) May
14, 2007 Monday Correction Appended
chasing a lob shot, the sport helps him forget about being sick.
"He likes being around other children," his mother said. "He loves the sportsmanship of being on a team. Chris will play
any game."
Chris screamed from the moment he was born, and at 4 months, doctors discovered why. They found cancer in his
abdomen, and though it went into remission with chemotherapy, it returned when Chris turned 3.
This was Halloween. By Christmas, the doctors said, Chris would die.
"How can you speak these words about my child?" Diane Zandstra wondered. "He's in preschool."
The cancer, called neuroblastoma, affects about 650 people each year in the United States, nearly all of them young
children. And though Chris survived the scare, his mother said the treatments forever changed his life.
Doctors soon discovered Chris had a speech delay that required language therapy, and he still speaks with a slight lisp.
His growth was also stunted, and Diane remembers how his height never appeared on the percentile charts doctors use
to measure children. (Chris took growth hormones for seven years but stopped the therapy after his bone cancer.)
As Chris got older, he started realizing what was happening during routine checkups. He did not like it when nurses
drew blood or technicians strapped him down for an X-ray.
"Mommy," he would say, "have them stop this."
When Chris was in sixth grade and doctors discovered bone cancer in his foot, Diane allowed him to choose his
treatment. Chemotherapy and radiation would not work, so Chris was told he could either have the heel removed and
keep his foot, which would be useless, or he could have his leg amputated below the knee.
His mother told Chris how cool it would be to have a "robot foot." He cried briefly - maybe about 30 seconds - and he
agreed. With a prosthetic limb, he knew, he could still play sports.
"Take it off," he told the doctor.
The surgery happened quickly, though the recovery did not. Despite his small size, Chris had played basketball and
soccer at St. Francis of Assisi. The cancer cut short his sixth-grade basketball season, and for five months he could not
walk or run. "I felt like I couldn't do anything," he said.
Sometimes, he felt his foot was being crushed or his toes were being pulled apart. But he looked down, and nothing was
there.
Doctors expected the bone cancer to recur in 12 months. It has not returned yet, but when doctors scanned his body in
July, they found another cancer - a spot on his liver. Doctors in St. Louis gave him 12 weeks to live without a liver
transplant, but no one told Chris until recently.
"Two weeks before that, I thought he had never looked better," his mother said. "In my wildest nightmare, I never
thought of a third primary cancer."
For a second opinion, Chris and his mom traveled to Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where doctors had
treated him as a child. His mother remembers how many of the doctors and nurses - many of whom had not seen him in
more than a decade - smiled when they learned Chris was still alive. "They were just thrilled to see him," Diane said.
Rather than trying a liver transplant, doctors at Children's removed 80 percent of his liver, then recommended an
experimental treatment at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

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JV tennis, all-world courage For St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra, playing on a team means much more than
it does to most students. It made him a winner before he ever played a match. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) May
14, 2007 Monday Correction Appended
Salem, his oncologist, said Chris is the youngest patient ever treated with TheraSpheres, a cluster of microscopic
radioactive glass beads that attack the cancer. The treatment has shrunk the tumor, but not eliminated it. Without
continued treatment, his mother said, it will continue to grow.
Chris, however, remains undaunted.
"I never thought I was going to die," Chris said. "I never think of death, really."
His doctors are wary of cause-and-effect relationships, but the Zandstras suspect treatments from his early cancer may
have caused other health problems. The growth hormones Chris started at 5, Diane said, may have contributed to the
bone cancer; "I was injecting him all those years."
Diane wanted to make her son's life as normal as possible, but when Chris approached her this winter and said he was
trying out for the SLUH junior varsity tennis team, she wondered if it was possible.
His treatment left Chris feeling groggy and tired most days. And he hadn't played tennis for five years, since before he
lost his leg. She wondered if he might embarrass himself, but when he told her he had to at least try, she could not keep
him from the court. He started hitting a ball against the garage door with a borrowed racket.
"I wanted to see how good I am," Chris said. "I love to play sports. I'll try anything."
He had wanted to play since November, when the varsity tennis coach, Dennis Dougan, came to Chris' homeroom and
asked the students to try out for the team. Chris agreed immediately.
"If you know Chris, you've got to believe him," said Dougan, also Chris' counselor.
His liver cancer, however, posed a problem. Chris travels to Chicago every two months to see his doctors, and when he
returns, he is often more tired than usual. In early March, just as tryouts were continuing, he needed his second round of
treatment.
Chris did not know it when he left, but he was a near lock to make the team. Early in tryouts, he had beaten two players
of similar skill level, and the team's coach, English teacher David Callon, wanted to reward him.
Still, Chris returned to the court on a cold, windy afternoon after a weekend in Chicago. Both his mother and Callon
told him not to overexert himself. Instead, Chris continued playing tennis until he felt he would faint.
"I went a little crazy," he admitted, saying he shouldn't have worn a long-sleeved T-shirt and shorts. On that afternoon,
however, he did not complain, except to say things like "the radiation took a lot out of me."
"He baited me into thinking it was all OK," Callon said.
The next two days, Chris did not attend school. He had a fever and barely left his bed. But he had made the team.
"His mom called us, crying, saying she was going to dedicate Masses in our names," Callon said. "To her, that was an
affirmation that her son could be a normal teenager."
Thirty-five students tried out for the junior varsity tennis team, and just 15 made it. Callon said Chris deserves to be on
the team - he has won more matches than he has lost - but acknowledges a special affinity for the teenager, saying the
experience of being on a team is important for Chris.
During matches, Chris hobbles near the net wearing a slightly too large team T-shirt and blue shorts. Though he has the
large hands of an adult, he is just 5 feet tall - shorter than nearly all of his teammates. His prosthesis starts just below his
right knee and looks more robotic than real.

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JV tennis, all-world courage For St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra, playing on a team means much more than
it does to most students. It made him a winner before he ever played a match. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) May
14, 2007 Monday Correction Appended
Callon began the season by quietly approaching the opposing coach and explaining Chris' health problems. Then Chris
started winning some of his doubles matches, and it seemed less important. His teammates also don't seem to care about
the way he looks.
Like everyone else at school, Chris' teammates call him "The Dutch Boy" -- a nod to his Dutch heritage. He plays
exclusively doubles, fluctuating between the No. 4 and the No. 7 team. He is slower to the ball than most of his
teammates, and he must start each point farther from the net than most players so he can defend against lobs and drop
shots. Callon said some teammates prefer not to play with him, but most don't mind covering the extra ground. These
concessions bother Chris little.
"It feels really good to be out there with my friends and play sports with them," he said.
During the winter, Chris told his mom he didn't really care if Callon selected him; he now admits how important it was.
"I really wanted to make the team," he said, smiling.
His friends say he always talks about tennis; in his afternoon theology class, he gives daily updates. They also say
everyone at SLUH knows him, if only because of the gag he pulled on Halloween. That day, he turned his prosthetic
foot so the heel faced forward, and most folks chuckled.
"He has missed school for weeks, yet he always comes back laughing," said Jamie Hagan, also a freshman. "It makes
you feel like, 'Wow, that kid is amazing.' "
When doctors told Chris he would be the first adolescent to receive the experimental treatment, he told them he hoped it
would help them understand how to treat future patients even if it did not work for him.
For now, however, there is reason for optimism. In mid-March, doctors said the liver looked good and he need not
return until the final week in May. And they told him to play as much tennis as he wants.
Still, no one knows what to expect. Even if the liver cancer remains dormant, the bone cancer could return and spread,
perhaps to his lungs, where it would do the most damage. His doctor declines to speculate.
"Prognoses apply when you have statistics on thousands of patients," Salem said. "There are no patients like Chris.
They just don't exist."
Chris doesn't dwell on the worst possibilities, but he wonders what would have happened if he never had cancer. He
looks at his large hands and knows he might have grown taller than 6 feet, like his dad.
"I don't think about being in the hospital," he said. "I try to imagine what a normal life would be like. Maybe I would be
a track star. Or maybe I wouldn't play sports at all. Who knows?"
Even Chris wonders how he has lived so long, how he has proved so many doctors wrong. Though there are no
guarantees he will be able to play tennis next spring, he remains optimistic.
In the short term, Chris will fill his life as best he can. This summer, he'll visit Spain with his cousin, SLUH junior
Gabriel Lima, and the school Spanish Club. He'll also continue visiting his dad each month in Chicago. And on June 16,
he'll get his driver's license.
There are plans for the future, too. Someday, Chris said, he hopes to become a doctor.
"I guess God's on my side," he said. "Maybe I have something important to do in life."
LOAD-DATE: June 26, 2007

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JV tennis, all-world courage For St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra, playing on a team means much more than
it does to most students. It made him a winner before he ever played a match. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) May
14, 2007 Monday Correction Appended
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION: Correction published, Friday, May 18, 2007. St. Louis University High School freshman Chris
Zandstra attended sixth grade at St. Clare of Assisi. The school was identified incorrectly in a report in Monday's Sports
section.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO
PHOTO - St. Louis U. High freshman Chris Zandstra competes in tennis with his teammates last week in Forest Park.
Photo by J.B. Forbes o St. Louis Post-Dispatch PHOTO - Kent Butzin, director of prosthetics at Orthotic & Prosthetic
Lab Inc., helps Chris Zandstra fit into a new prosthetic leg. Photo by J.B. Forbes o St. Louis Post-Dispatch PHOTO -
Chris Zandstra jumps regularly on his backyard trampoline with his younger sister, Ana Zandstra, 5. Chris got approval
from his doctor before he went back to the trampoline after getting a prosthetic leg. Photo by J.B. Forbes o St. Louis
Post-Dispatch PHOTO - Chris Zandstra stops to take some of the medicines that he must take twice a day, every day,
because of his previous fights against cancer. Photo by J.B. Forbes o St. Louis Post-Dispatch PHOTO - SLUH junior
varsity tennis player Chris Zandstra gets a pat from SLUH's star varsity player, Abe Souza, last week during matches
between the varsity and junior varsity. Photo by J.B. Forbes o St. Louis Post-Dispatch
DOCUMENT-TYPE: PROFILE
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
All Rights Reserved