While some area teams are still competing for spots in the spring state championship tournaments, arguably the area’s best example of the grit and determination that makes high school sports so compelling had her athletic career end on a dusty softball field this past Tuesday.
It was just before Christmas that Boyd-Buchanan senior Alexa Hickman completed an agonizing four months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for a rare form of cancer. Six surgeries and seven rounds of three-day-a-week chemotherapy followed by more than 50 rounds of radiation treatments, which often sent her back to the emergency room with severe nausea, had left a once energetic pitcher and leadoff batter too weak to climb steps and weighing nearly 20 pounds less than before she began the ordeal.
“You coach these kids long enough and they become like one of your own, so it hit me hard when we found out,” said Boyd-Buchanan softball coach Brittany Carbonell. “It just didn’t seem fair to me for a 17-year-old girl to have to go through this.”
For two years Hickman had visited doctors in Chattanooga, Nashville and Atlanta with pain in her right leg. Eventually a growth, originally believed to be benign, was discovered and removed at Vanderbilt Medical Center. However tests revealed it to be synovial sarcoma, a rare malignancy that occurs near the joints of the arms or legs and is typically found in young adults.
“I was in denial at first,” Hickman said. “You hear about other people having cancer, but you never think you’ll have to go through it.”