Katie Collier overcomes leukemia and a knee injury to play basketball and plan a bright future
A sudden diagnosis of rare cancer put more than Katie Collier’s basketball hopes at risk. At the age of 17, she was faced with the possibility that she might die before even starting college.
“One of the interns told me, if we can keep you alive for the next 48 hours, you’re going to make it,” recalls the Covington native. “I was in the hospital for two weeks, had chemo for eight months and was taking 20 pills a day.”
Her illness struck on a recruiting trip to the UW. She awoke in a dorm room with blood from her mouth all over her pillow. Within a day, she went from a seemingly healthy high school student weighing multiple college scholarship offers to treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia.
Fast forward a year and Katie had rebounded thanks to extraordinary treatment at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. She’d signed with the Huskies and was at summer practice before her freshman year when she felt her knee pop.
“After chemo, I felt stronger and I was ready to play. Then I tore my knee,” Katie says. “But who knows? Maybe it gave my body more time to recover from cancer.”
With “unbelievable support” from teammates and coaches, she underwent nine months of rehab with state-of-the-art conditioning regimens, training equipment and personnel — funded in part by Tyee Club donors.
Today, Katie is healed and healthy and has two more years ahead of her to play for the Huskies. Majoring in early childhood and family studies, she wants to work with kids — a passion she developed after volunteering with other cancer survivors at Ronald McDonald House.
As the youngest of five children, Katie is grateful to the donors — including the Tom McFarlan Scholarship Endowment, which funded her scholarship — whose generosity eases families’ financial burdens and who also helped make her recovery possible.
“It’s great to know that they see us as an investment and are willing to donate their hard-earned money to make our futures brighter.”
