The physician who performed Ginger Morrison’s bone cancer surgery not only “saved her life,” but he also posed a question to her that she believes changed her whole outlook.

When the 15-year-old, a freshman basketball player, faced risky surgery to remove the diseased tibia bone from her left leg, her surgeon, Dr. Raymond Morrissy, sat her down for a talk. “What are you really going to miss out on by not playing sports? What you really need to do is to build your life around knowledge. An education will never leave you.”

“To this day, I am living what he told me,” says Ginger, who is enrolled in the Associate of Applied Science in Business Administration degree program through the College’s Technical Division.

“I want to give back to the medical field because of my history with doctors and hospitals,” says the 23-year-old, who already has a degree as a Medical Coding Specialist. “One day, I hope to be an office manager for a doctor’s office.”

Although Ginger was enrolled in honors history classes while she was a student at Northwest High School, she was not able to complete a single full year of school because of three “trial and error” surgeries followed by periods of painful rehabilitation.

Her first surgery, in January of her freshman year, was successful in removing the osteogenic sarcoma, called Adamantinoma. This slow-growing rare disease was not actually what caused her to go to the doctor. An ankle injury led to the discovery, through an x-ray, of what could have been a tragic diagnosis, but turned out to be “a blessing in disguise.”

“It was actually a blessing,” she recalls, “that I went to the doctor for an injury instead of a broken bone. At the time, my tibia was pencil thin. If the bone had broken, the chances of the cancer spreading in my bloodstream would have been very great.”

Her diseased bone was replaced with a donor bone in a procedure called an allograft surgery. After her recovery, which took the entire spring semester, she returned to NHS in the fall of her sophomore year, but re-injured her leg during an automobile accident. Around one year after her first surgery, her leg had to be operated on again.

And later that summer, she had to undergo a third reconstructive surgery to add some of her hip bone to her ankle to strengthen it, which kept her from attending NHS the fall of her junior year.

“Looking back on it, I was very lucky, despite all of the surgeries,” she recalls. “Had they done my surgery a decade earlier, my leg would have had to have been amputated from the knee down. My surgery was considered ‘trial and error’ because it had only been done by a few doctors at the time. I considered myself a guinea pig for science, but it all worked out well. Today, I can walk. I can jump. I can dance. I can do pretty much everything I used to do.”

Her experience with cancer caused her to “grow up very quickly and to assume some big responsibilities,” Ginger says, noting that she missed out on the typical teenager parties, dances, and football games.

But her experience has given her greater empathy for young children and teens who face similar challenges. She often volunteers to help with events that raise money and awareness for the fight against cancer, including Relay for Life.

“I can actually look at what I’ve been through, and look at what I’ve accomplished and feel very proud.”