A Study in Spirit : High School Valedictorian Pursues Schoolwork Despite Brain Surgery

Nothing will stop Birmingham High School valedictorian William Ress from basking in accolades at his high school’s upcoming graduation ceremony--not the recovery from four-hour brain surgery, not the daily radiation treatments, not the fear of death.

The 17-year-old San Fernando Valley senior has lost most of his hair and much of his energy since January, when doctors found a malignant brain tumor behind his right eye. But Ress keeps on with the determination that has helped him earn straight A’s through high school.

Despite advice from teachers, counselors and friends to study at home after the surgery five months ago, Ress is finishing his last three Advanced Placement courses on campus with his classmates.

“With a lot of people telling me to quit, I’ve really had to assert myself,” said Ress, who lives in Encino. “But I would have felt like a quitter, like I didn’t take on what I knew I could handle.”

In the early morning hours of Jan. 29, without warning, a seizure shook Ress; his rocking bed woke his parents in the next room. He was taken to a local hospital where, after a myriad of tests, doctors found the tumor. One week later, he flew to San Francisco for surgery to remove it.

Little more than a month later, Ress was back at Birmingham, taking Advanced Placement courses in government, English and calculus.

Every day after school, Ress had radiation treatments at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank that robbed him of his energy and his hair.

Mingled with the baseball pennants, caps, posters and Little League trophies that clutter his bedroom are vivid reminders of his ordeal. The plastic mask he wore during radiation sits on a bookshelf by the door. Three hospital identification wristbands are taped to the wall above his bed.

“They remind me that even though I am looking toward the future, looking toward college, I have to stop and smell the roses. I have to remember the people around me now,” said Ress, who plans to attend Brown University in Rhode Island after a year at UC Berkeley. He will began a year of chemotherapy this week. His parents, who say doctors have not given them a definitive prognosis for their son’s future, are optimistic. “We’re just going with the flow,” said his mother, Mira.

Sitting cross-legged on his bed, a Brown University baseball cap covering his nearly bald head, Ress said that through his experience, “I found out that I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was.”

Although the importance of earning straight A’s faded after the surgery, Ress said, he stayed in school to regain a sense of normalcy in his life.

“I still want to do well, but it’s not the top priority anymore,” he said. “What’s more important to me is I’m finishing, that I stuck this out to completion.”

Ress grew up in a comfortable house on a quiet street in the Encino hills with his parents and older sister, who just graduated from Berkeley. He attended a private school for gifted students through the eighth grade, but went on to Birmingham High, as his sister had, because he wanted to meet students with different backgrounds.

At first it was a shock, he said, going from an eighth-grade class of six students at the Mirman School to a campus where he knew only a handful of the 3,000 teen-agers crowding the halls. But Ress quickly immersed himself in honors classes. Soft-spoken and with an unassuming manner, he made close friends and impressed his teachers and counselors.

“He is a brilliant, charming young man,” said Anita Gershten, his academic counselor. “He has a genuineness, a sincerity, that makes him a rare human being.”

The sudden illness forced Ress to face his mortality in a way few teen-agers ever do.

The tumor became the topic of conversation at home, Ress said. His father, who is an arthritis specialist, spoke to colleagues all over the country and read everything he could about tumors.

Ress said that instead of despair, the illness and the support of his family and friends helped him look to the future with more enthusiasm.

“Our class song is ‘These Are Days,’ ” said Ress, who will graduate June 16. “But I don’t think these are the days. A lot of high school students are living for now instead of looking toward the future. My life is in front of me.”