Accident reveals rare tumor

Blocking and kicking the circular form of black and white octagon-shaped patches, she moved in and out of the blue jerseys in front of her. Breathing heavily, she was sizing up her opponent’s next move.

After the game, she left the field and began to wind down. Her left hand was wrapped in white tape. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a thick brown rubber band. It was a little disheveled, and the stray hairs that line the crown of her head were gleaming with beads of sweat. The scar on her head was not visible.

In late February, Erin Krueger, sophomore business major and defender/midfielder on the GC&SU women’s soccer team, was in a car accident in her hometown of Newnan, Ga.

“I flipped my car and totaled it,” Krueger said. “It was just an accident that they found (the tumor).”

While examining her at the hospital after the accident, doctors found a spot in her CAT scan.

“It was right where my optic nerve is,” she said, as she pointed to the left side of her head. “I had to get tests on my eyes because it was wrapped around my optic nerve, and I could go blind with it.”

At the end of March, Krueger found out that she had a rare type of tumor.

“The doctor’s didn’t know anything about it,” Krueger said. “Younger kids are not supposed to have it. Barely anyone has it. I could have been born with it. They don’t know anything about it at all. That’s why they didn’t gamble with it.”

The medical staff scheduled her surgery for May 20, but Krueger was upset about missing her opportunity to go to the Grand Canyon that summer and work as a fire fighter.

“(The surgery) ruined the whole thing,” Krueger said, smiling. “I just wasn’t really that worried about (the surgery) because whatever happens is going to happen.”

Women’s soccer Head Coach Robert Parr has known Krueger for about two years.

“Erin had a great deal of composure about her, dealing with the unknown and facing the risks that were ahead of her,” Parr said.

“The good news was that from the very beginning, the expectation was that (the tumor) wasn’t going to be malignant, but they just didn’t know until they got in and did the surgery,” Parr said.

The surgery lasted four hours and left Krueger with two titanium plates that replaced the piece of bone removed from her scalp. Her recovery was supposed to take up to six weeks, but Krueger was back to her usual self within only two weeks.

“I couldn’t do anything for about two weeks,” Krueger said. “I had to lay in bed all day. I could get up some, but I couldn’t leave the house. But after that, I was fine.”

“The doctors told her that her recovery was a lot faster than they were expecting,” Parr said. “Because of her strong health from just being a competitive college athlete, (her good health) greatly reduced her recovery time.”

Krueger still visits the doctor every three months to have MRIs, and she may need to have surgery to take out the titanium plates. The medical staff is trying to make sure that the tumor has been fully removed.

“They don’t know if it’s gone,” Krueger said. “They got a lot of it out, but it’s something that can come back.”

Even though she knows of this possibility, Krueger keeps an optimistic outlook.

“I’m not an extremely religious person, but I thank God that everything worked out perfectly when it probably shouldn’t have,” she said. “Everyone told me I was basically lucky for getting into the car accident. A good thing resulted from a bad thing.”

Parr commended Krueger for keeping an extremely positive outlook on the situation.

“I want to give Erin a lot of credit because I think she went to great lengths to show strength and to reassure everyone else that things were going to be fine,” Parr said.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 23 2005. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry