She was just your typical girl, hanging out with her friends and playing sports. She came and walked the halls of Eisenhower, day to day, like all of her peers. There was just one thing different: alumna Cassie Hines did it with cancer.
“She was the same as any other senior sitting here. She was feisty and sassy and smart and excited about the prospect of growing up. She just had to do that with a lot of courage, because she didn’t know exactly what that future was going to be for her,” Student Council advisor Amber Bronson said.
Hines was about to go on spring break during her junior year when she started feeling pain in her back. She didn’t think much of it, until she got the flu and the pain started getting more severe. After a trip to the doctor, she found out she had a tumor around her kidney. The kidney was removed, but little did anyone know the fight was just beginning.
A month after the kidney surgery, the pathology reports came in: it was cancer. And it spread. That summer, her hip was replaced. During spring of the following year, Hines learned it spread even farther. Did that stop her from living her life? No.
“I think she just thought: ‘I have cancer, I’m sick, but I’m not that sick,’ because she was still doing her regular stuff and she was surrounded by people who loved her,” Hines’s mother, Karen Hines, said.
Even with Hines’s positive outlook, the cancer still affected her in many ways.
“She knew people were talking about her, but I think in some ways that kind of gave her strength, too. But then as the cancer wore on and she knew that this was a chronic cancer, that this was something she was going to have the rest of her life unless there was some kind of a miracle cure, I think at that point was when she struggled a lot more mentally,” K. Hines said.
Hines was diagnosed in March of 2008 and passed away in March of 2012.
To honor Hines, a charity basketball game is held every year. Teachers and students compete in the game to raise money for the Cassie Hines Shoes Cancer Foundation (CHSCF), an organization that sends young adults to cancer camps.
“When Cassie went to camp, she said it was the only time she felt like she was ‘normal’; because everybody here kid-gloved her all the time,” Bronson said.
Students are asked to donate $2 to watch the game for two hours and participate in various activities at the sixth annual charity basketball game held on Thursday, March 29 in memory of alumna Cassie Hines. Student who signed up to play in the game paid a donation fee and received a t-shirt in exchange.
Hines’s parents come to the game each year to talk about their daughter and her experience with cancer and share a startling fact: for every 200 young adults, one will be diagnosed with cancer before they turn 40, according to Hines.
“It’s important for us to get in front of groups of young adults so that we can get the message out there that this isn’t just about you throwing in dollars to go watch the teachers and the students play basketball or volleyball,” K. Hines said. “It’s about getting the knowledge of what the foundation does and being able to access that knowledge at some point in your life.”