In 2021, just as schools were reopening after the COVID-19 pandemic, 12-year-old Grace Messinger was still a remote learner due to her asthma, but that didn’t keep her from taking part in her regular classes.
One day, as Grace was holding a plank exercise during a remote physical education class, she felt something snap in her left shoulder. Believing it was a minor sprain from months of inactivity, Grace and her mom, Carrie, iced it and watched for bruising or swelling. When the pain still hadn’t subsided a few days later, they went to a local orthopedic clinic to get it checked out, and it was there that doctors discovered a large osteosarcoma lesion on Grace’s left shoulder and upper arm.
Grace received chemo, then limb salvage surgery, followed by more chemo, but even in the face of near-constant adversity, Grace remained upbeat, Carrie says.
“A child who loved sunflowers and the color yellow, Grace set the pace for her treatment and chose to fight from a place of positive energy,” she says.
Finding the Good
The first year of treatment was extremely difficult, compounded by the fact that it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, Grace had decided early on she wasn’t going to fight “depresso espresso,” as she called it.
“Grace just looked up at me one morning and said, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fight cancer like this. I want us to fight, but I want us to do it from a place where we have fun. We need to be positive and laugh and smile because I can’t fight like this,’” Carrie says. “And I was like, ‘If that’s your decision, then that’s what we’ll do, because this is your fight. I’m just along for the ride.’”
When Grace needed to be hospitalized — which was time and again that first year — Carrie did her best to make it as enjoyable as possible, and even on the hardest of days, Carrie and Grace found something to be grateful for.
“We always tried to find one positive thing each day to celebrate,” Carrie says. “And there were some days where that was a challenge, but we still were able to make that part of our daily routine.”
Carrie says she can’t help but think that Grace’s mindset throughout her osteosarcoma treatment was a big part of surviving as long as she did.
Grace finished treatment right before Thanksgiving 2021, but just two months later, doctors found new metastasis in Grace’s lungs, and she received thoracic lung surgery in 2022, followed by more chemo. A few days after finishing treatment, Grace spiked a 104-degree fever and was found to have sepsis with pneumonia on top of being neutropenic, so she was rushed to the ICU and placed on a ventilator.
The experience was profound for Carrie. She knew that’s not how Grace wanted to die, and she prayed it wouldn’t be.
“[Grace] had been very adamant, this is not what she wanted, but because she was neutropenic and had sepsis and pneumonia at the same time, there really was no other choice to save her life,” Carrie says. “All I could do was ask God, please don’t let her die this way.”
Thankfully, Grace pulled through.
