THE LEGACY OF HOPE.

This article focuses on Matthew Bendoritis and how he has survived despite being diagnoses with the same osteosarcoma that killed runner Terry Fox. It started with a sudden bolt, shooting down his right leg like an electric shock. His parents, Mark and Margita, booked an appointment with their family physician. Matt might have an infection, the doctor told them -- but there was a chance it could be cancer. Even before performing a biopsy, a surgeon in Edmonton gave them the dreaded diagnosis: their oldest son had malignant bone cancer. Matt, who turns 17 in April, was afflicted with the same osteosarcoma that killed Terry Fox in 1981. Like Fox, Matt suffered through an amputation of his right leg, although in his case an ingenious but oddly disfiguring surgical procedure saved a good part of the limb. Three times, the bone cancer has come back, and each time Matt's fought it off. Osteosarcoma typically strikes children and young adults. No one knows why, but scientists think it is somehow connected to the rapidly dividing cells associated with the body's growth spurts. In the mid-1980s, after Fox's death, clinical studies began showing that chemotherapy, when coupled with surgical removal of the tumour, greatly increased the survival of patients with bone cancer.Fox's Marathon of Hope, which began in St. John's, Nfld., 25 years ago, is one of the reasons for improved survival in many cancers. Matt's surgeon used an innovative technique known generically as a hip rotationplasty, first described by Dr. Winfried Winkelmann in West Germany in 1986. Overall, though, progress in treating osteosarcoma has slowed considerably since chemotherapy was added to the arsenal in the 1980s. "