Senior, Western Reserve Academy
Sports were everything to McCaffrey. He jumped from football to basketball to baseball and back. Then, at 11, he was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. “When I was diagnosed, they took part of me away,” he recalls. After 14 surgeries and a prosthetic leg, the 17-year-old Western Reserve Academy student athlete, who has participated in wrestling and golf, returned to the football team last year. Bad news: McCaffrey initially felt pain in his right knee that woke him up several nights in a row. After X-rays and an MRI, doctors concluded it was osteosarcoma. “When I heard ‘cancer,’ I thought, I’m going to die.” The first go-round: A Seattle doctor’s attempt to save McCaffrey’s knee using rods and screws ultimately failed. During eighth-grade gym class, he was riding a stationary bike, but couldn’t get a full revolution. “My knee wouldn’t go anymore,” he says. “I’d broken one of the locking screws.” Moving forward: The original surgery had never healed correctly, negating years of physical therapy and subsequent procedures. They had to completely start over. “The minute [the doctor] told me that, I smiled,” McCaffrey recalls. He was going to get the surgery he’d wanted: a rotationplasty, which removes the damaged knee and uses the foot and ankle facing backward as the new joint. “I had been going to school bald, so going to school with no leg was much better than going to school with no hair.” Field general: McCaffrey wrestled as a freshman and played golf as a sophomore. For football, he wears a special running blade, but removes the prosthetic entirely to wrestle in the 113-pound class. “That was the moment that I made it: the first wrestling match. I felt, I’m back again. I’m an athlete again.” More challenges: Last fall with the ball on the opponent’s 5-yard line, he took the field for a quick-screen play designed for him. “All I had to do was catch the ball and score,” he recalls. But when the pass came his way, he dropped it. “I may have had problems with my legs, but never with my hands or arms,” he says. “I’m looking forward this year to catching the ball.” Real world: McCaffrey’s favorite class is biology, because the subject is more than just words in a textbook. It’s something he’s lived. “I’m really interested in going into orthopaedic oncology,” he says. “Since all the struggle that I’ve gone through, I want to be able to help other kids in my situation.”
