Golfer Leaves Hospital as a Survivor, Returns as a Winner

Scott A. Miller/Associated Press

After her first pro golf victory in May, Laura Kueny visited the children's hospital that treated her for leukemia 20 years ago.

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH. — It had been nearly 20 years since the golfer Laura Kueny walked through the doors of Helen DeVos Children's Hospital as a young leukemia patient, but that same deep tug of anxiety came rushing back during a recent visit.

Kueny, 25, had returned for an important reason.

She had won her first tournament as a professional on the Symetra Tour, the L.P.G.A.'s feeder system, and took her trophy to the hospital to show Colleen Gardner, a registered nurse who was there when Kueny had experienced chemotherapy, high fevers and spinal taps as a 4-year-old.

"As I sat in that waiting room, I still felt the same nerves I had when I was little," said Kueny, a third-year pro who grew up in Whitehall, Mich. "It was bittersweet, and it almost brought tears to my eyes."

Those feelings were magnified when Kueny was among current patients and their parents in the hospital's waiting area. Kueny gave the nurse a signed photograph of her holding the trophy with the words "Never Give Up" written on the photo. She asked Gardner to post the photograph and if the children asked, she could tell them Kueny was a former patient now following her dreams.

"They were staring at me, and it was an overwhelming moment I can't describe," said Kueny, who often visits children in cancer centers during tour stops. "I didn't always have hope when I was little, but I want these kids to have it."

Kueny was 3 in 1992 when she was found to have acute lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. The news came as a shock to her parents, Jim and Karen Kueny, who were 23 and 22 at the time.

"They called our priest, and he showed up," said Jim Kueny, a golf club pro in Michigan. "It was all like a dream."

When the treatments began for her leukemia, Kueny was required to lie on a table in a fetal position while a long needle was inserted into her spinal cord. Multiple times, nurses held her down as doctors tested her bone marrow.

"I actually have a scar on my lower back from the spinal taps," Kueny said.

Kueny went through two and a half years of chemotherapy, lost her hair and became bloated from a drug, prednisone, used in her treatments. Her older sister Nicole came to her defense whenever she was teased.

The worst memory of her leukemia treatment involved a bronchial inhalation procedure in which Kueny was placed alone in a small, enclosed chamber. Antibiotics were sprayed into the chamber while Kueny inhaled the vapors.

"I remember crying and banging on the door and screaming for my parents to let me out," Kueny said. "That's when I learned to swallow pills instead of going through that."

Fortunately for Kueny, she was too young to understand how ill she was. She certainly did not understand why she was poked and prodded so often at the hospital.

"I knew there was something different about me, but I had no idea what was going on," she added.

Her mother, a registered nurse, understood the medical aspects of the disease and was encouraged by the fact that, statistically, her daughter's age and gender gave her an 80 percent chance of being cured.

"We tried to be stoic so Laura wouldn't be scared," Karen Kueny said. "I cried a lot in the shower."

Kueny's initial hospital stay was seven days. Doctors said she had gone into remission within two weeks. But when her fever spiked again, Kueny returned to the hospital for more treatment.

"Some kids there relapsed and didn't make it," Karen Kueny said. "It was really scary, and it's so sad that we knew children who did not have the success that Laura had."

Kueny picked up a golf club for the first time at age 4 during a charity golf outing to raise money for her medical expenses. The event was at Lincoln Golf Club in Muskegon, Mich., where her father was the club pro.

Kueny was weak from chemotherapy at that event, but she swung a cutdown club a few times on the first tee.

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