It has taken a long time for Heidi Peters to not only become comfortable with who she is but to come to love herself.
And it wasn’t easy, she said but it is through overcoming challenges and difficulties and a lot of self-examination that Peters was able to get to this point in her life.
That is what Peters told a gym full of Barrhead Composite High School (BCHS) students May 17.
“I didn’t like myself, I always tried to fit in. The only thing I cared about when I was your age was being accepted,” she said. “I was careful about the clothes I wore, how I talked and the music I listened too. I tried as much as possible to blend in.”
Peters is a 23-year-old Neerlandia native who competed in the 2016 Summer Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as part of Canada’s sitting volleyball team, finishing seventh.
Although Peters didn’t know it at the time, her journey of self-discovery would begin when she was in the spring of 2011, as a Grade 11 BCHS student.
“I was playing club volleyball when I developed what I thought were shin splints,” she said.
It turns out the pain and the bump she felt on her lower left leg was actually a tumor and after a number of different scans and test, on Sept. 9, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.
Doctors also discovered cancer had spread into her right lung.
About three weeks later, on Sept. 21, Peters had surgery to remove the three growths they found in her lung. Less than a week later doctors started an aggressive series of chemotherapy treatment.
“I just thought, wow this is really going to suck and it is going to be really hard and I’m not sure how I am going to do this,” she said. “Then it hit me that the only way through it is to go through it. There is no cheating or getting around cancer.”
In the following weeks and months, Peters said she had to give up the things she loved, volleyball, school, and her hair.
On Dec. 12, her surgeon amputated her left leg below the knee.
“They gave me the option of trying to salvage my leg, but it would have meant a lot of upkeep surgery and a lot of pain,” she said. “But I decided to go with the option that would give me the best quality of life and the best chance of preventing the cancer of coming back.”
In March 2012, Peters started physiotherapy, learning to walk with a prosthetic limb, and although she didn’t officially graduate she was able to attend grad with her friends. In August she completed her second round of chemotherapy and in September she returned to high school.
“Grade 13, it doesn’t get too much cooler, especially when you have a metal leg and buzz cut short hair, but I rocked it,” she joked, adding it was like someone had pressed the pause button on her life and didn’t press it again for a year. “In that year everyone else around me kept going, but I was at the same spot, but everything looked and felt different. My mobility had changed and all my friends were going to university, starting new chapters in their lives while I was playing catch-up.”
It was a difficult time for her, and whenever possible while at school Peters spent as much time by herself, in the graphics lab (photography has always been a passion of Peters’), or in her car.
“I had to work quite hard to get out of that hole,” she said.
After graduating, she enrolled in the photography program at NAIT. Two years later Peters entered the Grant MacEwan travel program, which she both successfully completed.
It was during this time, while attending NAIT, in 2013 that she was introduced to sitting 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.
Fast forward four more years, Peters said she has everything she has wanted, photography, a full-time job as a travel agent, her other passion, and volleyball.
However, even with all her success, she said she was struggling with self-esteem issues.
“People kept telling me how brave I was, but I didn’t want the spotlight, all I wanted to do was melt into the background,” she said, adding for a long time her self-worth was tied into what she was missing and that she saw herself as how she thought others perceived her.
Peters added after a lot of work and self-reflection she finally at peace with who she is.
“It only matters what you think of yourself. Trust me when I say that each of you has something inside you that is amazing to share with the world,” she said. “Secondly it is important to treat other people with kindness and respect. I know it is hard at times, but the way you communicate with others is a 100 per cent reflection of how you feel about yourself. But the most important thing I have learned is don’t be afraid of the challenges in life because they make you better. The more outside your comfort zone you are the more you grow and always remember you have a purpose, even if you can’t always see it yourself.”
