Libertyville resident Madelynn McInerney was diagnosed with migraines in seventh grade. Her headaches could last months at a time, and her symptoms just kept getting worse.
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“They gave me a lot of medicine because I wouldn’t be able to sleep for days,” she said. “I’d just be sitting in bed with a migraine not being able to move. None of it would work.”
Eventually her doctor prescribed seizure medication, but McInerney’s mother, a nurse, wasn’t comfortable with the side effects. Leigh Anne McInerney brought her daughter to see a doctor at Highland Park Hospital, who noticed that Madelynn didn’t have any peripheral vision in her left eye — a sign of a brain tumor. An MRI the day before Thanksgiving 2014 revealed a mass the size of four golf balls. The day after the holiday, McInerney had surgery. She was diagnosed with brain cancer and began proton radiation therapy on New Year’s Eve.
McInerney finished her treatment in February, but an April MRI found some areas of her brain could still be affected.
“I’m having an MRI at the end of May or June and they’re going to see whether my tumor came back,” she said. “I got through it one time. I’ll be fine. God only gives you what you can handle.”
That attitude earned McInerney, now 16, a Courage Award from Voices Against Brain Cancer, which she’ll receive on May 17 at the third annual Join the Voices! run and walk in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
“I’m very happy about it,” McInerney said. “They wanted someone who had a positive outlook and I guess I do. In the beginning I was very negative. I was kind of being selfish.”
Then, she said, she learned that there were others who had it worse than her.
“I was actually in a great spot,” she said. “My tumor wasn’t in a bad spot. Living near Chicago I had great resources medically. I pretty much had no reason to be upset.”
During her proton radiation treatment, McInerney woke up between 4 and 4:30 a.m. so she could get the first appointment of the day at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in order to miss as little school as possible. She’s currently a freshman at Libertyville High School.
“In seventh grade, I fell really behind because I would always get headaches,” she said. “After my surgery I missed about a month of school. It was really hard to catch up. I just missed being at school. Most kids don’t say that. The week after I got out of the hospital I made my mom drive me to school and I begged my teachers for homework. They wouldn’t give me any. They said I needed rest. But I just wanted to catch up. I knew it was going to be hard. Everyone goes to school. It’s normal and I didn’t like not being normal.”
She also wanted to be among her friends and classmates, who supported her throughout the treatment.
“My friends came to the hospital,” she said. “They took the train and my parents would pick them up at the train station or their families would come. People would come and drop things off. They would text me to let me know they were there for me.”
At first she kept quiet about what she was going through, even telling one classmate who asked why she’d missed school that she’d been in Fiji. But McInerney’s mother urged her to use her experience to raise awareness. Madelynn decided to fundraise for Voices Against Brain Cancer, gathering $6,000 — enough for 1,000 radiation treatment sessions — through bake sales, T-shirts sales and donation jars at stores in downtown Libertyville. She credits the organization’s efforts to fund research with the development of proton radiation therapy, which has fewer side effects and a lower rate of reoccurring cancer than other treatments.
“I tried to get people to notice that this is a cause that needs attention,” she said. “I wanted to give back to the society that gave me back my life. Without proton radiation, I’d probably be at way more risk at having cancer again. I had this amazing community around me built on foundations like this.”
As of Monday, Madelynn’s fundraising team was among the top 10 teams raising money for the run/walk. She is one of seven Courage Award recipients who will be honored during the May 17 event, which starts at 9 a.m. from Diversey Harbor in Lincoln Park.
Samantha Nelson is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.