Volleyball has always been a big part of Heidi Peters’ life. In fact, the popular sport may be responsible for helping save her life.
Peters, a Neerlandia native, is a volleyball player with the Canadian Women’s National Sitting Volleyball Team. The team recently competed, in and won, the bronze medal in the Parapan Am Games in Toronto in July. By winning the medal the team qualified to play in the 2016 Summer Parlympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“I have played volleyball, in some shape or form through junior high and high school,” she said.
In the spring of 2011, when Peters was in Grade 12, she was playing on a club volleyball team when she developed, what she thought was a simple case of shin splints.
“I was having more pain in my left shin than I thought was normal,” Peters said, adding that she continued to play and ignore the pain as much as she could.
However, when a bump appeared on her lower left leg, Peters and her parents decided she could no longer ignore the problem.
Starting in the early summer, Peters underwent a number of tests and scans to determine what the cause of the pain in her lower leg was, as well as what the nature of the bump was.
In late August, Peter’s doctor, after receiving the results of all the scans, decided to biopsy the bump and by early September the results were in – it was osteosarcoma, a bone cancer.
“I will never forget the date, Sept. 9, 2011. That is the day I was diagnosed with cancer,” she said.
As part of the diagnosis process Peters’ doctors also discovered that the cancer in her leg had spread to one of her lungs.
“They gave me three weeks to prepare for my treatment, although I really didn’t know what that meant,” she said. “I went to school and tried to be as normal as possible.”
Her treatment started on Sept. 21, with surgery to remove the three growths the doctors had found in her lungs. At the same time, Peters’ surgeon also put in a catheter, known as a central line, into a large vein so she could undergo chemotherapy treatment, which she started about five days after her surgery.
“The protocol for bone cancer is 40 weeks of chemotherapy treatments, but because it spread to my lungs they added four more weeks,” she said.
In any given week of treatment, Peters would spend three to four days at the Stollery Hospital’s oncology department as an out patient, for three weeks of the month.
After 12 weeks of treatment, it didn’t seem to be having much of an effect, so her surgeon suggested amputation as the best course of action.
“If I chose to do a limb salvage, my surgeon told me it would require a number of follow up surgeries and in the end I could have a much more active life if I underwent an amputation,” Peters said, adding that after talking it over with her family that is what she decided to do.
“It was pretty rough,” she said, adding one of the most difficult things about this period was that she wasn’t able to play volleyball with the rest of her friends and teammates. “Volleyball was such a big part of my life and just being able to visit and watch a few tournaments and not be on the court with my friends, really sucked.”
Peters said she dealt with it by the only way she could, by living one day at a time.
“You are in survival mode. You live day to day, because looking any further ahead is just too overwhelming. I lived like that for an entire year.”
Eventually she said life did return to a new normal. She returned home, went back to school and completed high school, graduating a year later. After high school Peters went on to NAIT and successfully completed the photographic technology program. Currently, she is attending Grant MacEwan where she enrolled in the travel program to become a travel agent.
Peters said she never really gave up on the idea of playing volleyball.
During her chemotherapy sessions at the Stollery, she met Jolan Wong, a player on the Canadian Women’s National Sitting Volleyball team. Like Peters, Wong lost her leg to osteosarcoma, about seven years earlier.
“She was volunteering one night at the Stollery when she met my mom and eventually me,” Peters said. “She encouraged me to try out for the national volleyball team when I was ready.”
However, Peters said although she was excited about the prospect of playing volleyball again, it took a year before she decided to take Wong’s suggestion.
“It’s been great. For the last two and half-years I have been on the national team,” she said, adding that the team meets every month to six weeks, most of the time in Edmonton to train.
In between, national team training sessions players from the various regions train in small groups.
“We’re really fortunate in Edmonton,” she said. “We have a really good group of volleyball players. There are four of us on the women’s team and there is a lot of members from the men’s team that live here too.”
When asked what her highlight of her national team career was, Peters quickly responded, the PanAm games, where the team won a bronze medal.
“We have a really great, young team,” Peters said, adding only two players on the team had ever been in any type of international competition. Peters is one of the players that hadn’t seen any international action before.
To prepare for the games, Peters and her teammates travelled to Europe to take part in a training session and an exhibition match with the British team.
To further prepare for the games, the team arrived in Toronto a week early, to get acclimatized to the venue and some additional practice.
Although Peters said even though they had a strong team, they knew they would be facing some stiff competition.
“The Americans and Brazilians are the best in the world and the Cubans, the team we played for the bronze medal, play a very unorthodox style that was hard to match up against,” she said.
As for what’s next for Peters she said she, like the rest of her teammates, are working hard to prepare for the Olympics and improve on their bronze medal performance.
“It is so gratifying to be able to represent your country and I am humbled to be surrounded by not only such great athletes, but people who have had to overcome so much to get where they are,” she said. “Everyone involved in parasports shares this unspoken bond and is something that I am truly amazed and blessed to be part of.”
