Brooke Marcus will win the battle

This story took first place for sports feature in the 2011 National Newspaper Association awards.

Brooke Marcus and her dad, Mike, sit courtside at a mid-October Lady Cats volleyball game. As the girls warm up on the court just feet away, Brooke is greeted by dozens of well-wishers. Like the reception line at a wedding, grandmothers, fathers and children all line up to smile at her, ask how she is, tell her how brave she is.

But as each person stops and holds her hand and tells her how happy they are to see her, her eyes drift over their shoulder to the young women clad in white, with Lady Cats splashed across their chests. Her eyes glint with envy.

The game starts and the volleyball players battle for every point. They scream and cheer and jump in the air in exultation. Mostly, they battle for points. Brooke, more than anything, wants to be out there with them. A lifetime sports nut, it’s all she can do to not jump on the court and slam a kill over the net. But she can’t. She has her own battle.

Last April, Brooke Marcus played in a basketball tournament with her traveling team. A few days later, she left for Costa Rica to save sea turtle eggs from being eaten by the locals. But something wasn’t right. She started feeling sick. She could barely stand up. When she sunburned her legs, blood pooled under the skin.

On April 18, she returned from Costa Rica. The next day she planned to go to an AAU volleyball practice with most of the Douglas High School team. She never made it.

On April 19, her feet were so swollen they wouldn’t fit in her tennis shoes. Her mother, Tammy Ware, brought her to Memorial Hospital of Converse County to see Family Nurse Practitioner Kellie Claussen, who performed a blood test.

The average young woman has 400,000 platelets in her blood. Brooke had 10,000. The hospital called down to St. Luke’s Presbyterian in Denver and were told to get her there as quickly as possible. Brooke was rushed onto a jet, then onto a helicopter to take her to St. Luke’s.

“It was really weird,” Brooke remembered. “I got taken in a jet to Denver. Then I got in a helicopter and my mom was with me, but she had to take a cab. They strapped me down to the bed and I was shaking.”

On April 20, Brooke was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a form of blood cancer that affects less than 4,000 children a year. Brooke said her blood was 75 percent cancer.

“For a while you’re in shock,” she said. “How can I be that sick? I played in a basketball tournament two weeks before I left for Costa Rica. I didn’t feel that sick. I felt like I had a cold or mono.”

“It took a little while for it to sink in that she was that sick and had leukemia,” Mike said. “She didn’t look sick for the first month or so.”

“It’s really hard to watch your child go through that,” Tammy said. “You certainly wish you could do it for them. You just have to take it one day at a time and have faith that she’ll be fine. If you try and think about the whole future, it’s too overwhelming. It’s been really hard to watch her.”

That future held two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy, including more than a month at the hospital to start with. For the first six months, Brooke has had to travel to Denver every week for chemo treatments. For the next two years she will have to go once a month.

Brooke, 14, was expecting to enter her freshman year of high school in Douglas. A straight-A student, she had spent the last several years in Buffalo, playing volleyball, basketball and returning to the Jackalope City in the summers to play softball.

“The biggest thing about Brooke is her love of sports,” Tammy said.

“Brooke has always been very competitive and determined,” Mike said. “She has played sports her whole life and learned the benefits of hard work and pushing through difficulties at a young age.”

Brooke played hitter in volleyball and forward in basketball. She was the catcher for the Douglas Dynamite through the 2008 season. Now, she waits with tepid anticipation for her sophomore year. That’s when she’ll be cleared to play sports again.

“Everything is a bigger deal,” she said. “To get to play sports, or to get to do things. For a long time you can’t do anything because you’re stuck in a hospital.”

For now, she does online school through DHS, but her smiling face and colorful bandanas are no stranger to the hallways. She still attends volleyball games, even goes up to the school and watches volleyball practices. She plans to attend basketball practices and games in the winter.

“I knew all of them,” she said of the team. “I was planning on playing. I was going to play AAU last year before I got sick.”

But she can’t make it to every game, or every practice. Because once a week she has to head back down to Denver, to St. Luke’s, and go through another round of chemo.

“After she started losing her hair and watching her get sick and lose weight it was very hard because there really wasn’t anything I could do other than find ways to support her through all her treatment,” Mike said. “As long as she is doing okay, I do okay.”

While in Denver, her family stays with Allyson Taylor, a friend of Tammy’s from their days in grade school here in Douglas.

Brooke spends her time at St. Luke’s in a children’s ward for cancer patients.

“There were a lot of really little kids,” she said. “They’re so cute. It’s so sad. There was a girl who was just getting done when I was starting. I talked to her a lot. I still text her.”

But one little kid stood out. The Little Warrior.

Brayton Morell was barely a year old when he was diagnosed with stage two neuroblastoma cancer in August. He had a four-inch long tumor in his brain.

Brayton is from Douglas, his mother Nicole works as a special education teacher at Douglas Intermediate School and his grandmother, Patty Morrell, worked at the Best Western.

“Brooke had come in to get her treatment and she had found out that we were there,” Patty said. “She just came in and started playing with Bray and he went right to her like he knew who she was. It was amazing.”

A month later, Brooke’s cousin Caitlin, the setter on the Lady Cat volleyball team, approached her about some ways the team could honor her. They wore pink and dyed their hair green in honor of Brooke’s favorite colors.

Then they started a Make-A-Wish fundraiser, selling placards for a wall in the rec center. But this year, instead of donating the money to breast cancer awareness, they were going to give it to Brooke for her expenses.

But Brooke had other ideas.

“I gave the money to a little boy in Denver who has a spinal tumor,” she said. “Everyone has been so nice to us, and he had just been diagnosed so I asked if we could give it to him.”

That little boy was also the Little Warrior.

“She’s just the sweetest girl,” Patty said of Brooke. “I had gone in to pick up a prescription at Frontier Drug and Traci Peplinski told me about what Brooke was doing. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s absolutely fabulous.’”

“We were in Denver for Brooke’s treatment right after Brayton was diagnosed with cancer and she and I stopped and visited him and his family,” Mike said. “They seemed to have an instant connection and that made her decision very easy.”

There’s a common line of thinking about 14-year-olds. The drama of entering high school is about all they can handle. They only care about themselves. They’re self-centered.

“This one wasn’t,” Patty said, “neither was that volleyball team.”

Brooke didn’t even enlist the help of her parents.

“I heard it from another mom at the store,” Tammy said. “The mom told me that was amazing of Brooke and how nice it was. People have been so giving to us so I was proud of her for thinking of someone else.”

Brayton is currently going through his fourth 21-day round of chemo.

“How precious are the children in this town?” Patty said. “How quickly the town comes together for one or more of its own. We have lived here for more than 30 years and it never ceases to amaze me the impact of strength and courage a community can really give back to us. We are truly blessed to belong to such a place.”

Now it’s a waiting game. There’s still the chemo, still complications like when her liver shut down and she had to be rushed down to Denver. But you’d never know it was a struggle when you’re sitting on a couch talking to Brooke in a pristine living room overlooking Laramie Peak.

“She has had an amazing attitude throughout it,” Tammy said. “She’s been very positive. She’s handled all of it really well. She just says, ‘This is what we have to do and we’re going to do it.’ She doesn’t get down. She doesn’t complain about losing all of her hair.”

When Brooke lost her hair, her little sister, Olivia, 10, shaved her head too.

“It’s been a life-changing event for everyone close to her,” Tammy said.

“I am obviously a little biased because she is my daughter but I think she is an amazing young lady,” Mike said. “She sees this as something that needs to be overcome and whatever it takes she will do it. She has been upbeat and pretty positive through everything she has already endured. I am so proud of her and feel like this experience is going to somehow positively impact others that she crosses paths with during her life.”

Right now, Brooke has her sights set on making one impact: in the wins column for the Douglas volleyball, basketball and softball teams.

“I think it helps that she is a little ornery and able to focus that energy and determination toward getting better, doing well in school, and playing sports next year,” Mike said. “How we overcome adversity helps shape who we are and she will come out of this a stronger and more determined young lady that can conquer anything that comes her way.”