Jocelyn Pain spoke of her illness and gratitude to hundreds of donor family members last year in Seattle at the annual remembrance services.

“Determination” may not be the middle name printed on her birth certificate, but Jocelyn Pain certainly has earned it since that document was issued 18 years ago.

The energetic senior from Washington’s Auburn Riverside High school not only has overcome adversity, she has taken hold of it and used it to help herself and many others.

And if her take-charge-gotta-do-it style of over-achievement hadn’t fully blossomed 10 years ago, the seeds of ambition surely were planted then.

A long road
In late March 1990, a week before her eighth birthday, “Jocelyn began limping and had a lot of pain in her right leg,” remembers her mother, Kelley Keaveny. “I always said that was her birthday present,” she added with a laugh. Actually, both assumed the pain was the result of a skating injury. At least that’s what they thought until the leg got worse.

A doctor examined the problem and quickly referred Jocelyn to a pediatrician, who even more quickly sent her to Children’s Hospital in Seattle where Dr. Ernest Conrad ordered a biopsy. “They core the bone like drilling for oil,” Keaveny explained. “Jocelyn had to be hospitalized.”

Even so, the biopsy timing was fortunate. “It wasn’t really an early diagnosis,” said Keaveny, “but early enough.” There was still time to do something about the bone cancer known as Ewing’s sarcoma that had invaded Jocelyn’s tibia.

“Funny how some little daily occurrence like getting bumped in the leg while skating can end up as a blessing of sorts,” observes Keaveny. “If it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had Jocelyn’s leg checked out and found the cancer.”

Three months of chemotherapy followed to kill the tumor. Then in July, Dr. Conrad removed three quarters of the tibia and replaced it with donated bone, also referred to as an allograft. The new bone was fastened with metal plates and screws.

Chemotherapy resumed and Jocelyn spent the next six months in a series of casts. “I threw up a couple of times a day,” Jocelyn notes. “I lost my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes and limped around in a cast. It was tough going back to school – everyone thought I looked like a boy and was contagious.”

That’s when her determination kicked in. She adapted. She persevered. After additional corrective surgeries and months more in casts and on crutches, she pushed ahead, becoming increasingly more active in and out of school.

“Her legs are perfectly even now and she has no pain,“ says her mom. In fact, Jocelyn ran cross-country – 40 miles per week — for Auburn Riverside and was also on the track team. “She didn’t come in first,” says Keaveny, “ but that’s okay – that’s my kid running out there. That’s my kid – alive.”

Driven to succeed
Perhaps Jocelyn’s biggest achievement – aside from surviving cancer – has been her work as an advocate for organ and tissue donation. She has reached literally thousands of people to increase their awareness of the need for donation.

Through school marketing and leadership development courses known as DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America), Jocelyn has promoted donation and won state and national honors in the process.

Her project, “Dare to share a piece of yourself,” became her passion.

“Someone decided to share his or her life and because of that decision, my life was spared,” Jocelyn explains. “Promoting donor awareness is extremely crucial because of the lack of available organs. That’s why I’ve chosen to do this project. I want to help the thousands of people who are not as fortunate as I am.”

So, she contacted local businesses to post billboards and fliers – 20,000 of them — that she designed herself, spoke to community groups, appeared on radio shows and in newspaper features, and through her work persuaded the governor and Auburn mayor to proclaim one week last November as “Organ Donor Awareness Week.”

In addition, she wrote a 30-page all-inclusive marketing manual and developed a presentation that her DECA teacher, Doug Aubert, called, “very passionate, very enthusiastic and ultimately inspiring.”

Judges at district, state and national DECA conferences agreed. In two separate projects, Jocelyn placed third and fifth in the state competition, which won her a trip to the recently concluded national conference in Anaheim, California.

“She’s so goal-oriented,” Aubert said about her DECA success. “She wanted to educate people on what it means to be a donor and the difference that it makes. And that’s just what she did — in compelling fashion.”

On her post-high school prospects, Aubert has no doubt: “She’s driven, one of the most driven students I’ve had in 20 years of teaching. She’s sort of in her own league.”