Life embraced.

Byline: Curtis Anderson The Register-Guard

After only her second outdoor race in nearly two years, Oregon sophomore Amanda Santana declared herself satisfied with her second-place finish in the 400-meter hurdles at last week's Pepsi Team Invitational.

The former state champion from North Eugene High School hit the tape in a time of 1 minute, 1.71 seconds, a mere fraction off her lifetime best.

At the end of the race, she soaked up the warm applause from the Hayward Field crowd and walked off the track with teammate Kasey Harwood. The pair quickly headed to the mixed zone, where athletes retrieve their warm-ups before being greeted with questions from the media.

On this day, however, Santana's focus was elsewhere.

She was searching for a familiar face among the gathering crowd of well-wishers, and it wasn't until she spotted her little sister, 8-year-old Bailey Santana, that she broke out her trademark grin.

`There's my Bay!' Amanda Santana shouted.

Bailey Santana, who was sitting quietly in a wheelchair, was decked out in full Duck regalia, including a UO baseball cap and jacket. She returned the smile, slowly stood up, and spread her arms wide for a loving hug from her favorite Duck.

The Santana sisters created quite a fuss in the mixed zone.

Television cameras captured the moment, reporters stood by with notepads in hand, and Bailey was even given an impromptu ride by Oregon pole vaulters Tommy Skipper and Jon Derby, who lifted her up in front of the West Grandstand.

After all, it was just over a year ago Bailey Santana, a perfectly normal, happy, dramatic and playful young girl, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The aggressive and fast-growing tumor was located in the worst of all possible places: on top of her brain stem.

The prognosis was beyond grim.

`The doctors told us she had three months to live if we did nothing, and maybe six months if we did treatment,' Amanda Santana said.

`We were like, `No. That's not OK. We're not going to let this happen.' '

In search of a cure

Pam and John Santana live on a farm in Salem, where they own and operate Santana Crane, Inc.

They were married five years ago. Pam Santana lost her first husband to prostate cancer at the age of 42, less than two months after Bailey was born. John Santana brought his two daughters - Amanda and Marissa - to the newly formed family.

The Santanas had just returned from a weeklong construction seminar in Las Vegas in early March of 2005 when they noticed something was wrong with Bailey.

`When we left, Bailey was fine,' Pam Santana said. `She stayed with my sister for a week, and when we got back, I picked her up at night, and the next morning, she started acting real weird to me. She was talking slow, and drooling, like she was drugged, and walking down the stairs real careful.'

Pam Santana called her sister and was told Bailey had been acting that way the entire week they were gone. Her first-grade teacher at Turner Elementary School said the same thing. Both of them thought Bailey had simply been missing her parents.

A visit with their family doctor didn't reveal much, so Pam Santana took Bailey to the hospital emergency room the following day, where a CT scan delivered the devastating news - there was a mass on her brain stem. The next step was an MRI, which confirmed their worst fears.

`They told us what it was, a brain stem glioma,' Pam Santana said. `They said it was inoperable because of where it was located. They couldn't even do a biopsy to see if it was cancerous. They said we could try chemotherapy or radiation and hope for the best, but they said she wasn't going to live.'

At this point, the extended Santana family frantically began scouring the Internet to find the very best doctors, clinics and hospitals to deal with the crisis. The search led them to Houston, where a doctor was doing clinical trials on similar childhood brain tumors. The decision was made to board a plane and fly to Houston.

Amanda Santana was determined she would not be left behind.

She met with her track coach, Rock Light, then a UO assistant, and talked to school officials. They agreed to allow her to redshirt the outdoor track season and withdraw from school for the spring term.

The original CT scan took place on March 22. Four days later, John and Pam Santana, along with Bailey and Amanda, flew to Texas.

They would not return to Oregon for more than two months.

A turn for the worse

Once in Houston, things quickly turned critical.

The morning after undergoing a procedure to install a central `port' in her chest so treatment could begin, Bailey Santana didn't wake up. Her tumor had begun to hemorrhage and she lapsed into a coma.

She was rushed by ambulance from the doctor's office to Texas Children's Hospital, where she was placed on life support in the pediatric intensive care unit. The doctors took the Santanas into a private room and told them to go say their goodbyes. They didn't believe Bailey would live through the night.

`It couldn't have been any worse,' Pam Santana said. `I've never been more scared in my entire life.'

The Santanas never left Bailey's side.

They prayed. They held her hand. They told her they loved her. And they told her to be strong.

To the astonishment of the hospital medical staff, Bailey not only survived the night, but actually seemed to be improving by the end of the week. When the doctors finally removed her breathing tube, the Santanas wanted to know what treatment options were available.

They discovered their only hope was radiation, but the risks were so high, due to the increased swelling in the brain, that none of the doctors at Texas Children's Hospital was willing to proceed.

`They told us she wasn't going to live,' Pam Santana said. `They told us to let her go.'

Instead, John Santana got back on the phone and eventually spoke with a doctor in New York who suggested they meet with Dr. Johannes E.A. Wolff at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, a facility that just happened to be across the street.

Although far from encouraging, Wolff agreed to begin radiation treatment.

`He was the one guy willing to do it,' John Santana said. `All along, he was very doubtful, and we knew the odds were very much against us, but they were all very caring. They wanted it to work.'

`It's a miracle'

For the next several weeks, a mask was placed on Bailey Santana's head as she lay motionless in a bed, and she began to receive intense radiation treatment directly into her brain.

The doses were given five days a week.

The Santanas never left Houston. John and Pam slept in a small bed shoved against a wall on one side of Bailey's room. Amanda stayed at a nearby Ronald McDonald House, a five-minute walk from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Whenever possible, family and friends - including Bailey's other sister, Marissa, a sophomore at North Eugene - would travel to Houston to provide emotional support. But it was hard not to get depressed.

Besides losing her first husband, Pam Santana also lost her mother to cancer when Bailey was 2, about a year before she was remarried.

`I was the worst one,' Pam Santana said. `I had to go off by myself. I wouldn't let anybody console me. I would go down to the chapel and pray, and beg God to save her. John was always with the doctors being Super Dad, and Amanda would come in as happy as could be, always smiling.

`It was harder for me, maybe, because I had already lost somebody, and here I was in a hospital again. It seemed like the same thing and the outcomes were not good. I was scared to death, but John and Amanda were both pillars of strength.'

Throughout the entire ordeal, the Santanas were desperate for any sign of recovery. Whether it was a blink of an eye, or a slight movement in her hand or foot, they wanted to believe Bailey was going to wake up.

One of Amanda's favorite routines was reading to Bailey.

One day in late May, when Pam and John Santana had stepped out of the room to get a bite to eat, she began reading the children's book "Sideways Stories From Wayside School," by Louis Sachar.

All of a sudden, Bailey began to laugh.

`I started crying my eyes out because I didn't know how to react,' Amanda said. `She's laughing, so she must be able to hear something. When my mom and dad came back to the room, I said, `You guys, I swear she was laughing when I was reading this book.' They told me I needed some rest.'

But it happened again the next day, and this time all three Santanas were there to witness the laughing. `When we told the doctors and nurses, they thought we were losing our minds,' Amanda Santana said.

The next day, Amanda was in the activity room, playing Battleship with one of the many young cancer patients she befriended during her stay, when her mom came racing into the room, demanding she come see Bailey immediately.

`My heart stopped I was so scared,' Amanda Santana said.

But when she got into the room, Bailey had a message for her. Very slowly, and with each syllable elongated, Bailey said: `Reeeaaad toooooo meeeeee.'

`We all started bawling our eyes out,' Amanda said. `We were screaming and yelling and cheering. One of the nurses finally came in and told us to keep it down, but when she heard Bailey talk, she freaked out and called all the doctors. Everybody was in hysterics. They were saying, `It's a miracle. A child woke up.' '

Enjoy every day

The Santanas flew back to Oregon on the first day of June.

Bailey Santana was a patient at Legacy Emmanuel Hospital in Portland for further treatment and rehabilitation until the middle of July, when she finally was deemed strong enough to return home.

She has had to relearn everything, including walking, talking and eating. It has been a struggle, and often frustrating for all those involved, but Bailey Santana is back in school in the second grade and doing quite well.

The tumor has stopped growing, but it's still lodged in her brain.

The prognosis from Dr. Wolff at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is simple and direct - enjoy every day.

The Santanas plan to keep fighting the tumor without the use of chemotherapy.

Bailey can no longer endure any more radiation, so they use natural enzymes and vitamins to strengthen her immune system. Bailey is on a strict organic diet and has weekly visits with a physical therapist, a speech therapist and a chiropractor.

`We're both trying as hard as we can, but it's tough,' Pam Santana said. `I know I'm the luckiest mom in the world right now. A lot of those kids that were with us in Houston aren't here today. I know those moms, and my heart aches for them.

`Sometimes it's hard for me to get past what Bailey was like, with her long, blond hair, running around with her friends, and I think it's not fair. I have to stop myself and remember where she came from just a year ago. ... Bailey has done a lot for our family. She's brought us all a lot closer.'

The outpouring of support for Bailey Santana has been overwhelming.

As Bailey's medical bills rise into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, fundraising efforts to help defray those costs have been ongoing ever since the Santanas first flew to Houston more than a year ago.

At the University of Oregon, Bailey Santana has been adopted by the student-athlete advisory committee as an official UO Duckling. Donations on her behalf will be collected at both the Oregon Invitational and Oregon Twilight meets later this season.

In the meantime, whenever Amanda Santana lines up in the starting blocks for the 400 hurdles, she will glance down to the outside of her thumb, where she has written `Bay' for extra motivation.

`It helps put things in perspective,' said Amanda Santana, whose goal this year is to reach the finals of the 400 hurdles at the Pac-10 championships.

`I like being able to tell her I do that for her so she knows how strong she is, how much her story touches everyone, and how amazing it is that she has overcome all these things. Bailey is truly an inspiration to everyone.'