"They were an amazing family. They coped so well. In a lot of families, if you have issues already, we see in a lot of these cases where there's such a stress -- the diagnosis itself, the treatment and the financial and emotional stress -- that a lot of families can't handle it. There's a lot of breakups, or husbands and wives are on different pages and they fight, looking for why this happened.

"With them, I saw that this brought them closer. They always had a positive attitude: We're going to get through this. We're going to be positive about it. We're going to continue in our life, not let it be this catastrophic event and not let us get down."

Five months later, in February 1996, Sarabeth's tumor had shrunk to half its original size. She was in surgery for nine hours. When it was over. Kathleen ran down the hall with the oncologist, yelling: "They got it out! They got it out!"

Six weeks later, on April 14, Jennie Perry gave birth to a baby girl. A day later, Sarabeth underwent surgery to have the chemotherapy line removed That day, Calvin Perry made two hospital stops: The Perrys went home as a family.

To honor Sarabeth's oncologist and surgeon, Laura Pirich and Marleta Reynolds, the Perrys picked a special name for their third child: Laura Marleta.

Sarabeth, who's in the sixth grade at Bloomfield Hills Middle School, is searching her closet for a CD that has her figure skating music on it.

She suffered fainting spells until she was 9. She will need dental work because chemotherapy affected the development of her permanent teeth. At the Detroit Skating Club, she receives frequent massages to rub out the pain she still feels in her right leg.

Children's Memorial contacts the Perrys at least once a year to follow Sarabeth's health, in part to monitor any long-term effects of chemotherapy. The Perrys moved to Michigan in 1998.

Sitting on her bed near her books, Sarabeth talks about her skating and says she sometimes meets with a sports psychologist. The psychologist has given her breathing techniques, she said, which has helped her when she performs to "put less pressure on myself."

"Because of everything that she's been through, I always want something good to happen" for her, Jennie Perry said of her daughter. "But it's Sarabeth's skating, not my skating. I let it try to be her thing now."

Sarabeth takes a visitor on a tour of her bedroom. She introduces her stuffed animals: Jessie, Francesca, Pooky and Mr. Froggy, the father of her stuffed rabbit, Matilda Jane.

On the other side of her room is a handwritten note on yellow legal paper from Scott Hamilton. Calvin Perry met the former Olympic champion and cancer survivor on a flight a few years ago. When Perry told Hamilton about his daughter, Hamilton was so moved he wrote to Sarabeth on the spot.

"If I do that, I'll try to do well from then on," she said. "When you think about it, I seriously think that God has blessed me already. Skating is just a sport."

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