Bucking a Big Dose of Adversity

There are thousands of high school athletes in Orange County, and when one of them faces adversity, it’s usually from an ankle sprain, a classroom problem or a scheduling conflict in their social life.

But for 18-year-old Jennifer Kim, captain of Garden Grove High’s girls tennis team, adversity is making it through a day without being reminded of her bout with cancer--and another scare from surgery on her neck.

Kim was 13 when she had one of her ovaries removed and spent six weeks undergoing chemotherapy. Last year, she had her thyroid removed because doctors believed that it might contain a cancerous tumor.

They found a large mass in her thyroid gland, but no cancer.

Still, the surgery left an 8-inch scar across her neck--a constant reminder of what she has been through.

And just in case she forgets, other parts of her body remind her.

Without her medication, Kim says, she can feel her fingers cramping up. “I feel really bloated. It feels like I’m dreaming.

“Sometimes, I think this is all a bad dream.”

She forges on anyway, and an observer would be hard-pressed to notice a physical limitation on most days. Kim’s team is well on its way to winning its fifth consecutive Garden Grove League championship. Garden Grove, ranked No. 5 among Division III schools in the Southern Section, is 11-1 overall, 7-0 in league play. Kim and Rachel Naishtut, her doubles partner, have won 35 of 36 sets.

But even during the heat of competition, Kim can feel as if she’s having an out-of-body experience.

“I’ll just stand there and watch my partner get all the balls,” she said. “I’ll just blank out.”

Fortunately, Kim stays mostly healthy, just as long as she takes her medication.

The most vital pill she takes is Synthroid, a replacement for the thyroid gland, which secretes a hormone that regulates metabolism and body growth.

“Without the pills, I wouldn’t be able to be here,” said Kim, who also takes three daily vitamins and an herbal supplement. “Even with the pills, I feel weak and I sometimes don’t want to be here. But I guess I’m hanging in there with all the people around me.”

Kim does more than just hang in there. She attends school each day, even if she has fallen asleep the night before without doing her homework. She goes to tennis practice, even if her body tells her not to. And she works at helping others in her predicament as vice president of the school’s Argos Against AIDS and Cancer Club.

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William Lou, Garden Grove’s girls’ tennis coach, is the club’s advisor and founder. Lou lost his parents to cancer. Last year, he saw senior doubles player Khanh Nguyen deal with the trauma of breast cancer, and he lost Kim for most of the season after her thyroid surgery.

Lou also coached Quynh Nguyen, a two-time Garden Grove League doubles champion in 1995-96, who battled rheumatoid arthritis.

“You look at these kids and they’re so young,” Lou said. “At times, I feel like I would be better off not knowing what they’re going through.”

Lou wasn’t aware Kim was ill until she informed him last fall that she would be leaving the team after five matches to have surgery. She played--against her mother’s wishes--up until a few days before being admitted to the UCI Medical Center in Orange.

By summer, Kim was back on the courts. Her doubles partner was not surprised. “She has a lot of inner strength,” Naishtut said.

And passion for tennis. “I love it,” Kim said. “For me, there’s sleeping, crying and hitting tennis balls as hard as I can.”

Yong Kim doesn’t attend many of her daughter’s matches, partly because her presence makes Jennifer nervous and partly because she worries about Jennifer’s health.

“I’m glad she’s so persistent and so involved with tennis,” Yong Kim said through an interpreter. “But as a mother, I wonder if it’s too strenuous.”

Lou also wonders how much Kim’s body can endure.

“I try not to let her condition affect what I’m trying to do,” he said. “But there are times I see she just can’t run as fast as everybody else.”

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Jennifer’s father, Sung Chul, never thought much of his daughter’s tennis career. He was a soccer star in Seoul, South Korea, and he always hoped she would play his sport. The Kims moved here from Seoul nine years ago to be closer to family.

Four years after they arrived, Sung Chul was told he had stomach cancer. Only a few weeks later, Jennifer started feeling pain in the right side of her stomach. Earlier, she noticed blisters on her legs. Doctors feared she might have AIDS.

The day after her father left UCI Medical Center after surgery--more than half of his stomach was removed--Kim entered to have the tumor and her right ovary removed.

The hardest part of the ordeal for Kim was the chemotherapy treatments, which lasted 24 hours at a time, once a week for six weeks. “I lost every strand of hair, and I had to wear a wig to school,” she said.

The following year, Kim entered high school and was talked into trying out for the tennis team by friends. Jennifer played two years of junior varsity singles before making the varsity. Lou said Kim and Naishtut were a perfect fit.

“They were both boisterous and had a little bit of an attitude,” Lou said. “I told them they had to tone down their act and become better team players.”

Kim didn’t care what she had to do as long as she could play.

“Tennis has been a great stress reliever for me,” she said. “And I love to compete.”

Lou said he has never seen Kim so committed to tennis.

“It seems as though her life is tennis this whole season,” Lou said. “She has stepped up as a leader.”

Kim credits faith and a positive attitude for her perseverance.

“I think it all depends on God,” she said. “It’s a blessing this has happened. There’s so many people out there suffering with worse ailments than me. I think this has all been a lesson for me to learn about myself.”

And she believes it could be a lesson for others, which is why she didn’t mind discussing the last five traumatic years of her life.

“I’m not ashamed of what’s happened to me,” said Kim, who would like to become a teacher and eventually a principal. “Getting sick and dealing with this process is part of life. If life was perfect, it would be boring.”