In the past two years, 17-year-old Nia Gantt has lived a lifetime.
It's been a time in which the Wilde Lake High School senior has seen many young friends die -- and in which she's had to face her own mortality through battling a rare form of bone cancer. And she's gone through surgery and painful chemotherapy, a treatment that made her woefully sick and forced her to miss almost half of her high school years.
Her cancer is in remission now, but she's been forced to grow up fast.
"I had a very boring life before," she said. "Nothing was wrong with me. . . . I wasn't even aware kids died from cancer, because I always thought it was an adult thing."
Hers is a story of a young, athletic girl whose sports career suddenly was cut short by a life-threatening disease, but whose optimism never diminished and who now intends to spend her life helping others in similar situations.
The slender teen-ager with a smile that can fill a room was already playing varsity lacrosse and field hockey in her sophomore year in high school. A continual ache and a swelling above her right knee forced her to see a specialist, who diagnosed her illness as "osteogenic sarcoma," a rare childhood bone cancer that can be fatal.
Nia, who lives with her mother, Beryl Gantt, and older brother in Columbia, spent months at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore undergoing chemotherapy and recovering from reconstructive surgery in which doctors replaced her femur with an 8-inch-long metal rod. While she walks normally now, she still goes to physical therapy to gain better use of her leg.
"When she started out, she was scared just like anybody else," said a close friend, Beth Wenger, 16, of Columbia. "She tried very hard to keep it up for us. She would make comments and she would joke around still, so we knew she was still Nia."
The cancer caused Nia to miss four months of her sophomore year and virtually her entire junior year, when she received home tutoring between trips to the oncologist. But she made it to school as often as she could while struggling with the side effects of the chemotherapy.
"She was still motivated and still carried her backpack, which I thoroughly disapproved of," said Herb West, a teacher and her adviser. "I had to assign another advisee to, essentially, follow her to classes. She never wanted pity or anything like that."
But Nia had to miss school activities, and that was difficult for her. She had hoped that she would be able to attend homecoming her junior year, but the oncologist didn't give her approval.
For a while, she feared she would not be able to attend her junior prom. "It's hard always being told where you can or can't go," she said. "I had high expectations. But when you're in 'chemo,' whatever your oncologist says is important."
She made a lot of friends at Sinai Hospital's pediatric ward, where often she was the oldest patient on a floor of toddlers and youngsters suffering from leukemia and other forms of cancer. Many of them would die.
"The nurses and the doctors all knew I knew them," she said. "Nobody wanted to tell me. I didn't know why. I just didn't see them, and then after a while, I just didn't ask because I knew. You wonder why certain people die and certain people don't."
Friends and teachers admire her for her fortitude.
"She's a lot stronger . . . person now," Beth, her friend, said. "She's done a lot of growing up. She's needed to handle something as an adult when she was a teen-ager."
"She went out and succeeded despite many odds," Mr. West, her adviser, said. "I don't think the average kid could have done it. I think there was something unique about her, the kind of person she was, and it also had something to do with her heart and the positive outlook she had."
Nia has learned not to take for granted the simple things in life, such as her friends, her health, having a full head of hair -- she lost her hair during chemotherapy. "I am reminded everyday. I love to touch hair," she said as she patted her short, coiffed tresses.
She says she has also become closer to her mother and brother, and to her father, who lives in Washington, D.C. And, since she no longer can participate in her favorite sports, she's found other activities that give her fulfillment and strength.
She's secretary of her class council and a National Honor Society member. She helps organize the school's blood drives. "The most important thing before was sports," she said. "Now there's so many other things to do."
She still goes to physical therapy three times a week -- a painful and tedious but critical routine from which a passion has grown to study "PT" in college. "I feel like there's a purpose in my life now," she said. "I'm very aware now."