Resilience Story: Forget about the leg, just watch him dance
08.03.2022 - 08:39
/ abcnews.go.com
basketball team donned “Team MacKale” shirts in his favorite colors – fluorescent orange and black. Soon, people all over town were wearing them.MacKale, also called “Mac,” has been cancer-free for more than five years.
He credits the support, especially from his family, with helping him get through challenging times.But his parents say MacKale has always been pretty resilient, perhaps because he’s dealt with hard things his entire life. He was born with hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder.
So when the cancer diagnosis came, he was accustomed to visiting doctors and hospitals.His mom, Marsha McGuire, says he also seems to have forgotten or compartmentalized the worst moments in his cancer journey – the nausea from chemotherapy that made it hard to eat or the pain from the unsuccessful attempt to use a cadaver bone to save his leg.After a surgeon in Florida presented amputation as an option in 2018, MacKale quickly agreed.“When he had his full leg, he was more handicapped than he is now without his leg. It was like a dead weight,” his mom recalls.
“When he had his amputation, it’s like the whole world opened up to him and he seemed more confident to all of us.”MacKale started out as a manager for his school soccer team. His coach eventually encouraged him to play.“I just remember that first time and feeling the wind blow through my hair again,” he said.
“… I was hooked from then on.”As a sophomore, MacKale scored a winning goal in a shootout during a tournament game. With the help of a “blade” prosthetic that gave him more speed and agility, he played varsity this season, his last at Cadillac High.“I try to like look for things that I can do, rather than things that I can’t do,” he said.Even when the coronavirus
.