Jeremy Eagle proudly displays his diploma from Todd County High School. the senior has been battling cancer for most of the current school year. (Courtesy photo)

Here’s a story from the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal about a courageous young man from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. We’d say his graduation served as a Christmas gift, except that it was no gift – Jeremy Eagle earned it.

By Mary Garrigan of the Rapid City Journal

Jeremy Eagle’s bone cancer has stopped responding to chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but it was no match for his dream of high school graduation.

On Wednesday, the Todd County High School senior fulfilled his goal of earning a high school diploma, despite the illness that has kept him out of school and fighting for his life for most of the 2009-10 school year.

During an afternoon ceremony in the Royal Balcony of the Sioux Falls Sanford Children’s Hospital, two days before Christmas, Eagle donned a graduation cap and gown in Todd County’s school colors of royal blue and gold. Josten’s donated the gown and a symphony quartet played “Pomp and Circumstance.”

“I wanted to graduate. I didn’t want to be a dropout,” Eagle told reporters who attended his graduation ceremony. “You need to graduate to go on in life. I was always told if you don’t get a diploma, you won’t amount to anything.”

“We’re extremely proud of him and all he’s accomplished,” said Sheri Mortenson, the in-hospital school teacher for Sanford USD Medical Center, which includes the castle-themed children’s hospital in Sioux Falls. Mortenson collaborated with staff at Todd County High School in Mission to determine that Eagle has met the school’s requirements for graduation.

Eagle, 20, was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma in March and has had numerous hospitalizations in Sioux Falls, where he quickly became a favorite of the pediatric oncology staff.

“He has a delightful sense of humor,” Mortenson said of a young man who is also “a little bit shy.”

Eagle considers many of his Sanford caregivers to be like family, and the feeling is mutual, Mortenson said. “We are just so pleased and honored to be a part of Jeremy’s life.”

Because Ewing’s sarcoma is most often diagnosed in adolescents and young adults, it falls under the pediatric spectrum of cancers, said Michelle Ahnberg, R.N. Ahnberg is Sanford’s pediatric oncology coordinator who has watched Eagle work through fatigue and illness to do algebra and geometry assignments in the hospital’s classroom. Math has always been his favorite subject; science his least.

“I can’t understand science at all,” he said.

“He’s worked so very hard in midst of being in pain, in the midst of hospitalizations and feeling nauseated. He’s continued to plug away at school,” said Ahnberg. “For most people, school graduation is a goal and we’re so excited that we can give him the opportunity to reach that goal.”

Ahnberg also watched Eagle make the recent decision to manage his cancer with pain control, comfort care and the spiritual treatment of a medicine man back home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

When he’s discharged from Sanford sometime next week, he’ll return to the Rosebud Indian Health Service hospital for palliative care, and to the hopes of his family and tribe.

“His cancer is not responding to chemotherapy and radiation. He and his family have made the decision to seek treatment by their medicine man, and we will never take that hope away,” Ahnberg said.

Eagle lives with a cousin who has been his guardian.

“He really wants to go home,” she said.

Eagle had a few words of advice for others at his graduation.

“Just keep trying and you can do it,” he said.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com

Tags: buffalo post, Native American news, Rosebud Sioux Reservation, Sioux Falls Sanford Children's Hospital