Harris County student didn’t let cancer ‘take everything away.’ Now she’s a state titleholder
Winning a state oratory competition is impressive enough, but when you learn the topic of the speech Harris County High School junior Addison Stewart delivered, well, you realize this wasn’t a typical extracurricular project.
Addison won first place in the Georgia Family, Career and Community Leaders of America Themed Speech Competition last month at the Georgia National Fair in Perry. The theme was “Dare to Dream,” in which she shared her story about overcoming cancer and striving toward her goal of becoming a music teacher and directing a high school band.
In FCCLA, Addison chose the education pathway. As part of that, she was a student teacher in the Harris County band class for fifth- and sixth-graders at Creekside School, which put a “huge smile on my face,” she said in her speech.
After missing two-thirds of last school year because of her cancer surgery and doctors’ appointments, Addison was at risk of not being able to continue in the program. But with assistance from education-as-a-profession teacher and FCCLA chapter coordinator Jennifer Robinson, she fought the bureaucracy and logistics of class scheduling to rejoin the program.
“I wasn’t going to let something like this take everything away from me,” she said in her speech. “I wasn’t going to let this take my dream away from me, something I have wanted and worked for since I was little.”
Addison concluded her speech by giving her audience some advice:
“We all go through things that we never thought we could get through, but that dream deep down inside all of us is the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said in her speech. “So fight for that dream. Nothing is unimportant or impossible. The smallest dream can be something huge one day, so don’t dim your light.”
Opportunity
Only 14 of the approximately 2,500 Georgia FCCLA members were chosen to give a speech that day. Addison originally wasn’t in the selected group. But the day before the competition, Robinson received an email saying someone dropped out and HCHS could fill the spot, even though it was the school’s first year having a chapter in the organization.
Addison spent the rest of the day rehearsing.
“I was just lucky for getting in the competition,” she told the Ledger-Enquirer. “I didn’t really expect to win.”
Robinson was glad to see Addison have such a prestigious experience.
“I want the kids to have as many opportunities to use what they’ve learned about being an educator, to gain those communication skills, to speak in front of people,” she said. “That’s where the confidence in the classroom comes from.”
Robinson, in her 23rd year as an educator, described what she sees in Addison as a student and aspiring teacher.
“She has a natural ability to be flexible in situations,” Robinson said. “She’s very good at self-correcting. … She’s very self-aware.”
Composure
Addison also is good at composing herself amid adversity.
While waiting for the speech competition to start, Addison walked around the fair with a friend, “stuffing our faces with food,” she said. “… I had a turkey leg and a caramel apple — and the two did not mix on top of my nerves.”
About half an hour before her speech, Addison’s nausea overwhelmed her, and she vomited in some bushes. But dropping out of the competition wasn’t an option in her mind.
“If I don’t do this,” she told Robinson, “I’m going to be mad at myself.”
After washing her face and her hands in a restroom, Addison went to the competition venue, where Robinson helped calm her.
“Just breathe,” she told her. “… I’ll be sitting in the back row, so look at me and tell me your story. Just talk to me, like you do every day.”
And that’s what Addison did.
“When I got up there, I just focused on J Rob,” she said.
The result?
“It was most natural,” Robinson said. “It didn’t sound canned. It didn’t sound rehearsed. It was really well done. … At the age she’s at, and the perseverance and resiliency, I think it was pretty magnificent.”
Winning this state competition, Addison said, “is another thing I can say that I’ve gotten through.”
Just like beating cancer.
Diagnosis
While making eggs for breakfast on a Saturday morning in November 2023, Addison fainted and fell onto the kitchen floor. She was 16. She wasn’t aware of having any previous health problems.
“My family has a history of anemia, so my dad went to get iron supplements from a store,” she said. “… They gave me something to eat with the iron, but I just kept throwing up.”
Addison got a blood test at an urgent care facility in Hamilton.
“They said it would take a day to get the results back,” she said, “so they sent me home thinking maybe I just got the flu or something because my sister had gotten sick a couple days before.”
On that Monday, Addison learned her hemoglobin — the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells — was at a dangerously low level. Her mother was instructed to immediately take Addison to a hospital emergency room in Columbus, where her hemoglobin was tested again.
A normal range for her age and gender is 12 to 16, but Addison’s hemoglobin level was 4.5, a life-threatening situation.
Addison was put in a wheelchair and taken to a hospital room. More bad news followed: She also had internal bleeding and a blood-clotting disorder.
Transferred to the pediatric floor, Addison received a blood transfusion. Despite regaining a healthy hemoglobin level the next day, results from a different test showed a cyst on her left ovary.
Then the size of the cyst doubled within one month, so Addison had surgery in February to remove not only the cyst but her entire left ovary because the cyst was embedded.
About three weeks later, she was diagnosed with a stage 1A granulosa tumor, meaning the cancer hadn’t spread outside her ovaries. But it still was cancer — and scary.
“I cried,” she said. “I was constantly crying. … I adore kids, and I had this fear that I won’t be able to have any. … You’re only born with however many eggs, so if I choose to have kids and my cancer comes back, I can potentially freeze my eggs, but there’s no guarantee. They don’t know yet because of my age, so I won’t really know until I try.”
Gratitude
Ovarian cancer in teens is considered rare, but Addison is grateful it was caught at an early stage.
“I was very lucky,” she said. “Everyone was shocked because you don’t really see ovarian cancer in this young of an age.”
Addison also feels fortunate that her fainting episode led to her cancer diagnosis.
“It was God’s plan,” she said. “… If I didn’t pass out and my blood levels weren’t what they were, then they wouldn’t have caught it. … It’s very common for you to see women get full hysterectomies and go through radiation because there were no signs.”
Doctors determined Addison didn’t need chemotherapy or radiation. But for the next three to four years, she will have an oncology appointment with scans and blood tests every three months to check whether she remains free of the disease.
“I have had cysts come back that they monitor,” she said, “but none are showing any cancerous signs.”
Her medical crisis took time and energy away from classes and studying. She went from A’s and B’s to C’s on her report card. But her grades have recovered along with her health after relinquishing a leadership role in the school band to concentrate more on academics. Addison had been playing tuba since sixth grade and dabbled in marimba, but now she participates in the band’s dance team.
“I realized you can make positives out of something so negative,” Addison said. “… I feel like my experience with all this really made me grow up faster. … It really made me grow a bigger backbone and really strive and apply myself to things and be like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that, but I will do this,’ or, ‘I’m not going to give up.’”
Mentor
Through the darkness of her struggles, Addison has seen a guiding light in Robinson’s support.
“She’s like a best friend,” Addison said. “She is just that person that you can go and talk to, and she really is invested in all of her students and making the best experience for them. … She is so trustworthy, and she’s always putting people before herself. … I feel like she is one of the people that was put in my life for a very good reason.”
Robinson inspires Addison with her words and actions.
“I can be having the worst day ever, and I can be struggling so much to where I do not want to do anything,” she said. “… But I can walk in (her classroom) … and just watch her teach and interact with the other kids, and I can be like, ‘That’s my future.’ It’s like I know why I’m here.”
In turn, Robinson is thankful to hear Addison say she has made a positive impact.
“It makes me very proud,” she said. “I’ve always said that teaching is a calling. It’s not something that should be your fallback career, your plan B. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that I’m doing exactly what God has designed for me to do.”
