Coach’s daughter confident she’ll knock out cancer

You can’t stop Mary Louise from thinking about the future.

That’s the next time she’ll be able to go on a vacation with her dad, John Pawlowski, Auburn’s new baseball coach. It’s the next time she’ll drag him on one of those “loop-de-loop” roller coasters; the type of ride that he’ll only strap himself in for if his “feisty” 14-year-old daughter — his “hero” — is right by his side.

Don’t bother her with the past, or even the present, which has her rotating from her house in North Augusta, S.C., to five-day-at-a-time chemotherapy sessions at a children’s hospital in Augusta, Ga.

She’s lost her hair and she’s lost a year of school with her best friends. But nowhere along the way of this now-yearlong journey has she lost her confidence that this cancer, one of the rarest forms found in children, will eventually be beaten.

“She’s been in the mindset where we’re going to beat this thing,” Pawlowski said. “It’s an inspiration. She’s a hero for me to see what she’s been through and to see how she’s tackled it.”

‘Devastated’

The news hit Pawlowski harder than a wayward slider to the ribs.

“It knocks you to your knees,” Pawlowski said. “It makes everything else, all the issues and the problems you have going on at the time, very irrelevant.”

Mary Louise came home from volleyball practice one night, complaining of soreness on her right side and back. Probably just a pulled muscle, Pawlowski thought.

X-rays revealed a spot on Mary Louise’s lungs, a touch of pneumonia, doctors told Pawlowski. After a few days off school and a couple weeks’ worth of medication, Mary Louise was supposed to be back on the volleyball court.

Instead, the pain got much worse. A trip back to the doctor’s office, followed by second and third opinions from across the country, confirmed it.

This wasn’t a pulled muscle or even a bad case of pneumonia. Mary Louise had a tumor the size of a fist in her right chest wall. If action wasn’t taken soon, it’d soon be the size of a volleyball.

“It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, was tell my daughter that,” Pawlowski said. “She was devastated, and we all were devastated.”

Mary Louise’s cancer is known as primitive neuroectodermal tumors (PNET). It is a rare form of bone cancer seen in only 2 percent of children afflicted with cancer.

Pawlowski, coaching at the College of Charleston, denied the prognosis at first. Something’s wrong, he thought, the doctors must be wrong. Then, he got mad.

“Why? Why’d this happen to her?” he asked. “I’d trade. I’d trade with her in two seconds if I could.”

The third stage sent Pawlowski into action. After reading everything he could possibly find about PNET on the Internet, Pawlowski was convinced that Mary Louise could knock this disease out cold.

Mary Louise had long beat him to it, throwing punches from the start.

‘Doing her thing’

Mary Louise is a 14-year-old journalist — sort of.

She frequently updates a blog on her personal Web site, mlpfoundation.org.

From the start, Mary Louise took the glass-half-full approach, and has been pumping sunshine ever since.

“Until December 13, 2007, I thought life was normal and almost kinda boring,” Mary Louise writes. “But life has a way of knocking you out of your comfort zone, making you get up, brush yourself off and prove how tough you can be.

“I think I’m pretty tough. I know I can beat Cancer.”

She’s well on her way.

Mary Louise had surgery to remove the tumor April 30. She has since been in and out of the hospital for rounds of chemoapy. She wrapped up a successful session Monday and has one more to go. In December, she will have a full-body evaluation to see if all the cancer has been wiped away.

“She has led a different life this year, totally different,” Pawlowski said. “She’ll have a different perspective on life than all of us.”

In between her time in the hospital, Mary Louise continues her schoolwork at home with a private teacher. When she has enough strength, she’s just another eighth-grade girl, taking trips to the mall with her two sisters.

But it’s hard, Pawlowski said. It’s hard when your white blood cell count drops so low that a common cold could send you to the emergency room. It’s hard when nausea can overtake you at any moment.

But Mary Louise won’t show it. She won’t fake it, either.

When she lost all her hair after the first round of chemo, Mary Louise’s mother, Sarah Ann, bought her a wig. It cost $1,000 and insurance didn’t cover it.

It also doesn’t cover Mary Louise’s head anymore.

“She said ‘This is not me. This is not who I am,’ ” Pawlowski said. “Would she like to have her hair back? Sure, but that’s the least of her worries right now. She gets out in public and does her thing. That’s great.”

Two weeks after her surgery, which removed the tumor and two of her ribs, she was out of the hospital and with Pawlowski in Clemson, dad’s alma mater, for his team’s game against the Tigers. In her honor, the Tigers wore purple jerseys and purple wristbands with the message “We R Praying 4 MLP.”

Pawlowski has since doled out thousands of the bracelets, a number of which will be worn by his new players at Auburn.
It was the start of something big.

Saturday night’s benefit at Moore’s Mill Golf Club Pavilion raised at least $5,000 toward the MLP Foundation. That foundation, by the way, was the brainchild of Mary Louise.

The non-profit organization takes donations and gifts to support cancer research and helps others burdened by medical-related expenses.

“So many positive things come out of this every single day,” Pawlowski said.

Running man

The walls in Pawlowski’s office are bare. Most of his belongings are in storage.

He’s been in Auburn for 122 days now, and he still hasn’t moved out of his extended-stay hotel.

“Anytime you change jobs,” Pawlowski said, “your life gets thrown into turmoil.”

Sure, it’s been hectic since Mary Louise received her diagnosis. But heck, life’s been crazy ever since Pawlowski chose his career.

Now, though, he’s living a life without blinders. The tunnel vision he used to peer through is gone. Mary Louise’s battle has opened up everything.

“We all get in this rut where we’re zoned in and nothing is going to stop us,” Pawlowski said. “Then you realize ‘Hold on, what’s really important and what are we here for?’
“It’s not material things, it’s not things we’re going to take with us, it’s not about how much wealth we’ll accumulate. It’s how we treat other people and how people want to treat you.

“It’s helping people.”

When Pawlowski has a free afternoon, he drives the three hours to North Augusta to check in on Mary Louise and visit his two other daughters, Christine and Jenny. Pawlowski and Sarah Ann are divorced.

But when Pawlowski has only a free hour or two, he throws on his running shoes and jogs until he is needed back at work.

Pawlowski is a marathon runner. He’s run one a year in each of the past eight years.

This year’s trip sent Pawlowski up north for the New York City Marathon, where he traded shin splints for cash toward cancer.

In another idea spawned by Mary Louise, Pawlowski created the Web site runcoachrun.org and collected donations that went toward the Medical College of Georgia Children’s Medical Center, the hospital Mary Louise has checked in and out of over the past year.

“She wanted to help give back to the people that have given to her,” Pawlowski said. “She’s something special, that’s for sure.”

Marathons don’t get easier as you get older, said Pawlowski, 45, and the latest one was certainly a challenge. Temperatures hovered around freezing and Mary Louise, who originally planned to be there at the finish line, couldn’t make it because of her latest round of chemo.

Pawlowski finished the marathon in three hours, 48 minutes and 22 seconds. The next day, he jumped on a plane and flew to Augusta to visit Mary Louise in the hospital and give her his consolation prize.

“She was hoping she’d be there at the finish line, but unfortunately it didn’t work out,” Pawlowski said. “But when I put the medal around her neck, she was pretty excited about it.”

That excitement promises to continue.

When this rollercoaster ride of an experience comes to its happy ending, you better believe Mary Louise will be first in line for the tallest, loopiest rollercoaster she can coax her dad to ride.

“She’s going to beat this,” Pawlowski said. “And we’re going to look back on this and say, ‘What an experience.’ ”

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