INDIANAPOLIS — The pain was the kind of brutal that hurt just to talk about, the pain from the tumor that started in Bridget Balcerak's neck and spread to her chest cavity. It started as a "bulge" she joked about with her teammates at softball practice in the spring that turned out to be an ugly, horrendous cancer by volleyball season in the fall.
The pain was Hodgkin lymphoma which meant chemotherapy, radiation, 105-degree fevers, vomiting, baldness, mouth sores, chills that turned to freezing, dry heaves in the morning from not being able to eat.
She was so weak. And she was so scared.
Bridget Balcerak was absolutely sure she was dying.
Except for those angels in the red shirts that sat at her bedside. Every time Balcerak thought it was surely the end of her life or that she just couldn't go on, there was a sweet soul in the darkness holding her hand, assuring her she wouldn't die, comforting her, telling her everything would be OK.
You will get through this, Bridget. It won't be easy. Cancer is hard, but you have to keep fighting.
FROM 2019:She beat cancer twice. Bridget Balcerak is 'heart and soul' of Martinsville volleyball
Balcerak never forgot those nurses at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health who were there for her from the first cancer battle in 2017 to the relapse of her cancer in 2019. Balcerak was a star athlete at Martinsville High, 15 years old, when she was diagnosed.
And because of those nurses at Riley, she kept playing the sports she loved, softball and volleyball, she left the hospital cancer free, she graduated from Martinsville and she went on to nursing school.
And now, in a courageous and brave move that is harder than she ever imagined it would be, Balcerak is back at Riley caring for and comforting other patients, doing exactly what those nurses did for her. Working on the exact same floor, in the exact same unit, in the exact same rooms where she was treated.
"I'm so thankful. It sounds weird to people outside to say I'm thankful that I had cancer, but I got to learn the kindness of people," Balcerak said last week. "And, honestly, I want to be that person for somebody else."
'Man, I can't believe it's cancer'
The first symptoms started long before the cancer diagnosis came. They were symptoms the family could push aside and rationalize, but looking back, they were clearly signs of cancer slowly growing inside Balcerak's body.
They started in seventh grade. Balcerak would wake up in the morning and her chest would hurt, it would ache, and she would have a hard time breathing. That's where the cancer was, from her chest up to her neck. Balcerak said the family thought it might be pleurisy. Her father Butch had had it in his younger days.
There were other signs, too. Throughout sports, Balcerak was always spraining her ankles and her wrists, but they seemed to never heal. Doctors later said her body was probably overwhelmed trying to fight the cancer.
Then came the fatigue that hit her freshman year. Balcerak would go to school, then to practice, come home and fall asleep. She would force herself to wake up, do her homework and eat, but then she would fall back asleep. Even in class, she would doze off. The family wrote it off as Balcerak being a growing teenager and a hardworking athlete.
But then on the way to softball practice her freshman season, Balcerak felt the bump on her neck. She showed it to her mom, who assured her it was probably a swollen lymph node but told her keep an eye on it. It was big enough that Balcerak's teammates noticed it, too.
Soon, it was impossible to explain away. At her annual sports physical, Balcerak asked her pediatrician about the bulge. As he felt it, he said very bluntly: "It could be Hodgkin (lymphoma). Let's send you to Riley and get an X-ray."
Fifteen-year-old Balcerak had no idea what she was in for when she first heard those two words Hodgkin lymphoma. She didn't Google it or worry about it. She had no idea it was cancer, a cancer that starts in the body's white blood cells called lymphocytes, which are part of the immune system.
After hours and hours of tests and biopsies at Riley, Balcerak remembers being called back a few days later to get the results. She had Stage IIA Hodgkin lymphoma.
Still, those words didn't alarm her, not until she was eating dinner with her parents at the Stacked Pickle, which was blocks away from Riley. "My dad was like, 'Man, I can't believe it's cancer,'" Balcerak said.
"And I said, 'What? It's cancer?"
'I was so mad. I knew what it was'
Within the first few days of being treated at Riley, Balcerak started noticing those nurses. They were so sweet, every single one of them. And they always made her feel better, every single time.
The chemotherapy made her bones hurt, but it didn't stop her. As Balcerak walked off the elevators at Riley after the first round of treatment, she told her mom she could feel her body aching. But she had a softball game to pitch.
"Are you sure you want to go to the game?" Nancy Balcerak asked her daughter. Balcerak replied with an emphatic "yes." She was not going to let cancer stop her.
But as she pitched that game, Balcerak started feeling dizzy and she was so tired. Her coach asked her what might be causing it. He had no idea she had just had a chemo treatment.
"Maybe you should take a break," he told her. No way. That wasn't the athlete Balcerak was.
Through the pain, Balcerak finished that game and got the win. And then she finished several more rounds of chemo and got an even more critical win. Her scans came back cancer free.
But Balcerak didn't get to feel that freedom for long. She was standing in the shower when cancer crept back up on her for a second time, when she felt another lump. This time, it was on the other side of her neck.
"I knew what it was. I was feeling it and I'm like, 'Gosh darn it, and I was just, I was so mad," Balcerak said. "Because this time I knew what is was going to be like again."
Instead of thinking of herself, Balcerak started worrying about her parents. She really didn't want to tell them. She knew how upset they would be, how sad they would be.
"I was debating on it for so long,'" she said. "I knew they were going to be more heartbroken than I am." But she had to tell them.
Balcerak walked into the kitchen where her mom was and stood for a moment, gathering her thoughts, just looking at her. "What is it?" Nancy asked her daughter.
"Mom," Balcerak said, "I have another lump on my neck." Nancy started crying.
Balcerak was angry. She was mad at this terrible disease. She was mad her family would have to go through it again, mad she would have to go through it again.
But she had no idea. This time the cancer was more aggressive, more brutal.
This time, Balcerak was sure the cancer was killing her.
'He stayed right with me'
The tumor had returned with a vengeance, pressing up tightly on Balcerak's trachea, leaving only a four-millimeter airway for her to breathe. The wheezing was awful. She couldn't seem to get a deep breath.
Balcerak was given emergency radiation to try to relieve the pressure from the tumor on her airway.
But when doctors went to biopsy the tumor, they decided it was too dangerous to put a breathing tube down her throat because of her narrowed airway. Instead, Balcerak endured the removal of the lymph node while she was awake.
And it was a lot to endure, a lot of pain. As Balcerak described it, "They had to dig out that lymph node and cauterize around it." When the procedure was over, Balcerak asked to see the tumor.
"If you can just imagine what cancer would look like, it's exactly what it looked like," she said. "It was ugly, it was nasty, it was brown, it was all intertwined with all these blood vessels."
The biopsy came back with devastating results but they were results Balcerak and her family already suspected. She had Stage IIA Hodgkin lymphoma again.
And this time around, those angels in the red shirts became even more crucial to saving her life.
There were the nights when nurse Baylee Messamore comforted Balcerak as she cried, telling her it was OK to feel angry and frustrated and it was OK to feel sad to be missing out on things at school and in sports and with her friends and family.
Messamore remembers comforting Balcerak as she vomited into a bag, weak and frail, being fed by a central line.
"She was crying, saying that she couldn't do it anymore. And I kept telling her, 'Yes you can. You can do it. You're almost over the hump,'" said Messamore. "Those were some hard nights."
But those hard nights were made a little easier because of Messamore, said Balcerak. The two immediately clicked. Messamore was fresh out of nursing orientation and connected quickly with the teenage Balcerak.
When the unit was dark and Balcerak couldn't sleep, Messamore would sit and talk with her.
When she went through the scariest time of her cancer fight, the stem cell transplant, which was preceded by the most intense chemotherapy she had received, Jake Harmon was the nurse who was there for her.
Her high fevers caused tremors and shaking, and I was like, 'Well, this is it,'" Balcerak said. Harmon talked her through it.
"He's sitting there, and he's like, 'I know, it's scary,' So he's just listening." she said. "I was so scared, which he could not think that it was a big deal at all, but for me it was a huge deal, and I was terrified. He stayed right with me."
That was when she knew 100% without any question. Balcerak wanted to spend her life doing what these nurses had done for her.
'The good that comes after all this bad'
Balcerak did just that, enrolling in nursing school at IUPUI, graduating and coming back to the place that saved her life, working alongside the same nurses who saved her life.
Messamore found out Balcerak had followed through on her dream to be a nurse when she saw her name on a list as she was looking for another nurse's name. Harmon found out when he was in a room late at night talking to a former patient from the stem cell unit.
Balcerak was in the room as the patient's nurse when she mentioned she had been on the stem cell unit around the same time in 2018. Harmon asked to see her name badge. He couldn't believe it. This was the teen he had cared for. And she had really become a nurse. He was so proud.
None of it has been easy, Balcerak says. The sound of an IV pump, the smell of an alcohol wipe, walking into the room where she was once treated, walking into a room to care for a teenage girl who reminds her so much of herself, all of that has triggered some post-traumatic stress in Balcerak.
But in Harmon's eyes, her past is exactly what makes her remarkable as a nurse.
"That ability to empathize and say, 'I know how uncomfortable it is or how it feels to throw up every single night or every single morning,'" he said. "She'll be really good at emotional care. She's going to be a really special nurse because of her past experience."
When Messamore learned Balcerak had followed through and become a Riley nurse on the cancer unit, she was emotional.
"We do this job because we love what we do, but then you see the impact that it has on people, that they think about you years later or that they think, 'I want to be this person. I want to do what they did for other people, what they did for me,'" Messamore said. "And it just feels so special and makes you really feel like you're making a difference."
Making a difference. That is an understatement in Balcerak's eyes. Her Riley nurses changed her life. They saved her life when she was ready to give up the fight.
And now she is trying to instill that same fight and spirit in the patients she cares for.
"You meet friends here that you've lost to cancer. It's hard. I want to make a difference. I want to come back and I want to take care of them how my nurses have taken care of me," Balcerak said. "I will be a good nurse to them. I will sit with them and listen to them while they cry or give them a hand to hold."
The courage that takes, Messamore said, is a testament to the kindness and spirit of Balcerak.
"She overcame so much, not just with her cancer journey but also the mental load of that," said Messamore. "It was hard, but she was so determined to do it. And what strength that shows.
"She is showing all of our patients and their parents the good that comes after all this bad. And I'm just so, so proud of her."
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.
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