ALBEMARLE — Candace Thomas has won a $1,000 American Cancer Society college scholarship.

So?

So aren’t a lot of high school seniors winning thousand-dollar scholarships this time of year? Maybe a little more, maybe a little less?

But with college costs what they are today, will a $1,000 scholarship be enough to matter? Will it matter to Candace?

Is it big news?

Yes, yes, yes and yes!

To an 18-year-old high school senior (her birthday was Thursday) and to her family — who didn’t know seven-plus years ago if she’d live to celebrate her 11th birthday much less her 18th — that scholarship means life itself. Life and a future that might have never been — and a dream coming true.

Before that terrible Labor Day of 1993 when Candace was 10 and a doctor came to her parents in the hospital waiting room with scans in his hands and bad news, before the brain tumor was diagnosed, before the operations and bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy and radiation, before her long blonde hair fell out and she couldn’t recognizing that curly, brown-haired girl who looked back at her from the mirror when it began to grow back, before the fear and the prayers and the miracles, Candace Thomas wanted to be a veterinarian.

She’s always filled the house with cats and dogs and fish and rabbits, but now ...

Being a vet isn’t possible now.

Learning is harder now than it used to be. It takes longer. And she needs help.

But she’ll graduate with her class at North Stanly High School on May 25, and she’ll begin studies at Stanly Community College that will qualify her to go to Gaston Community College, which offers a veterinarian’s assistant program.

And that scholarship, which is renewable, makes it possible — and it makes Candace happy.

Even the unexpected way she found out about the scholarship convinces her — if she needed any convincing — that God was there. With her. Unfolding His plan for her life.

She found out it was available because a routine announcement about a $1,000 renewable scholarship for cancer survivors from the Southeast Division of the American Cancer Society hit Salisbury Post managing editor Frank DeLoache’s desk — and he remembered Candace.

Of course, his image wasn’t as clear as the images that still flit across her parents’ inner screens.

They see Candace, a happy fourth grader. Candace sick, the blue gone from her eyes. They see themselves waiting while Candace lies on an operating table for 812 hours and doctors try to remove a malignant tumor in the middle of her brain — but can’t get it all.

And now, miracle of miracles, they see Candace healthy again, her hair lighter and straighter, her eyes a hazel instead of that clear blue of a perfect autumn sky that disappeared and never came back.

They see Candace laughing with her dogs, getting a license, driving herself to school.

Oh, so many images were printed in their memories and in the Post as readers lived with what it means to a family when a little girl who was supposed to become a cancer statistic became a cancer survivor instead.

Frank dropped the release on my desk, with a brief note.

“Don’t you know a little girl who might be interested in this?”

Oh, yes, she and her parents were interested.

And on a sunny afternoon a few months later, her mother, Debbie Thomas, calls.

“Candace got the scholarship!” she says, her voice joyful. “We’re ecstatic!”

She got a scholarship to go to Stanly County Community College where she’ll take basic courses, and then she’ll go to Gaston for its veterinarians’ assistant program, and who ...

Who could ever have believed that could happen?

Wonderful support

“It’s wonderful that she got it. It’s wonderful that she’s going to get to go to college,” says her father, David Thomas, trying to say everything he’s feeling all at once. A million dollar scholarship couldn’t mean more.

“We thank everybody for the support, the help. It’s just wonderful ... We’re just so fortunate to have her and to have her in the shape she’s in. Seven years ago I didn’t know if she’d ever drive. Seven years ago, we didn’t know if she’d know us when she woke up. We’ve been very blessed.”

But Candace hadn’t had the surgery yet when she got the Post’s attention in 1994.

Someone called to say the children at Albemarle Elementary School had collected 130,000 pennies because they heard that the insurance company wouldn’t pay for a little girl at New London Elementary to have a bone marrow transplant to rid her of a brain tumor.

They had to do something. That little girl was their age. One penny might not be worth bending over to pick up, but 334 children, putting all their pennies together could collect $1,300 to help her. So Post photographer James Barringer and I went to watch the presentation, and she and her dad were both bald — and we heard what had happened.

Start of the trouble

How in August, two days after school started, David and Debbie noticed the pupils in Candace’s eyes were so large they’d lost their color. No blue. Just black. And things looked blurry.

Someone examined her at school and thought she should see an eye doctor. The eye doctor thought she should see a pediatrician.

It was Labor Day, 1993 weekend and so hard to get a doctor that it was midnight when a doctor finally told them it was a brain tumor, and they should take her to Duke the next morning.

At Duke, the doctor changed his schedule so he could operate on her immediately. After 812 hours of surgery, he said it was cancer. He couldn’t get it all.

Debbie heard the words and felt like she was living a nightmare in somebody else’s body.

But she wasn’t.

So she rearranged their lives.

During the next four months, Candace had four operations, four chemotherapy sessions and all the debilitating illness that brings — and the doctor said a bone marrow transplant was the only hope. But their insurance wouldn’t cover it.

That’s what got the children’s attention. And the attention of doctors, nurses, hospitals and the media — and eventually she got the transplant, months of treatment and so much love that it was hard to comprehend.

How can you see love through a bald head?

You can, her family says, and they learned how.

If she lost her hair, her daddy told her, he’d shave his off, too, so she wouldn’t be alone. She lost hers, he shaved his — and so did a half dozen friends.

To keep them company, they said, and find a few laughs when laughs were scarce.

Hair, they learned, doesn’t matter much.

Life and love do — and fighting every step of the way to get their daughter the bone marrow transplant she had to have and the money to pay for it.

Nothing was easy.

And life kept changing.

One night, after a bad day when chemo had given Candace mouth sores, diarrhea and much suffering, Debbie knew she had to become a nurse and help other people get through what she had just seen her daughter through.

Eventually it all came together. Candace was cured. Debbie went to nurse’s training and became an oncology nurse at NorthEast Medical Center. And Candace was ready to graduate from high school — with her class — and move on.

But brain surgery took a toll. At school she needed special help.

They listed her as “other health impaired,” which, her mother explains, means that since the sixth grade, “she’s had health problems that interfere with her learning capabilities.”

But the school made adjustments. Gave her more time to take tests — or let her finish after school or have a test read to her.

“She’s done pretty good,” her mother says, “but she’s not going to be able to take a full load in college. Too much just overwhelms her ability.”

The radiation slowed her thyroid and requires medication. And radiating the tumor messed up her body’s circadian rhythm cycle.

“So when it gets dark,” her mother says, “she’s ready to go to bed.”

Candace was so glad for daylight savings time because now, she told her parents, “I won’t be in bed by 7 o’clock.”

That, her mother says, has an effect on learning, on everything.

“She understands as much as we do about it,” Debbie adds. “She just knows she has to compensate, that she has to work harder than other people do. Things don’t come as easy to her when it comes to learning.”

Or as they once did.

“So we do things like make note cards for her to study. If she doesn’t understand, she goes to the teachers and goes back after school. She knows she’s got the deficit, and she says she’s not proud of it, but she knows she’s got to live with it.”

They had to explain all that and why it happened and her willingness to compromise at Stanly Community College, her mother says, and she sighs.

But it’s a happy sigh.

“We didn’t think we would ever get this far.”

Close to home

The scholarship to Stanly Community College is wonderful for so many reasons. Candace doesn’t want to leave home yet. She worries that she’d have trouble juggling being on her own and taking a full load. But Stanly will let her take a couple of courses the first semester and a couple the second ...

And it’s only five minutes from home, and she can drive.

She’ll feel more secure at home with her parents, and near her doctor if she gets sick, and with her dachshunds, Brandy, the oldest, and Peewee, the sweet one, and her Sheltie, Bandit, that she got just before she had the bone marrow transplant.

And then she’ll go to Gaston for the veterinarian’s assistant program.

It’s all possible. She’ll get an education in the field she wants. She’ll just get it slower than the average person.

And the whole family can handle that.

Since the first big question — would she live? — they’ve learned how to handle the unknown.

“We didn’t know if she would live,” Debbie says. “I think we got to the point that the unknown was just too much for us to bear, so we just kind of put it in the Lord’s hands and let Him take care of it and not think about the future.

“But that’s hard. People are planners. We plan for a future and for our retirement and for tomorrow and for when we’re going to take a vacation.

“But none of us knows about tomorrow, and I think when we got to that point, it got easier. That was the point we had to get to to be able to survive it.

“And that didn’t happen right away. Things would get better and then they’d get worse and then they’d get better. There was too much to deal with,” she says, but finally they realized they could leave it up to God. “You just take the decisions as they come and try to make them as they’re given to you and not think about what’s coming next.

“And that’s our philosophy even now. We’re not going to worry until we know there’s something to worry about.”

When Candace and her older sister, Miranda, were little, Debbie says, she worried about the silliest things. About somebody kidnapping them. About them drowning at the swimming pool.

“Now it’s like God has everything under control. You do the best you can because what happens, happens for a reason.”

Because of what happened to Candace, she says, “we’re closer — as a family, to the Lord, to each other. I made a major career change. I can see God’s hand in everything that’s happened.

“It’s just changed us completely. We’re just not the people we used to be before it happened. Sometimes it’s just so hard for me to believe. People think miracles don’t happen anymore, and God’s no where around.

“But Candace is alive. And seeing her every day and seeing God’s hand in every bit of it ...”

She hesitates.

“It’s just had to comprehend that God would do that for us. Every day we we have we count as such a blessing.”

And Candace knew it all along. “God put me here for a purpose,” she says.

“And I never really thought about dying. I knew either way Jesus knew what he was doing.”