Photo by Sue Suchyta
Allen Park High School seniors Samantha Trimble (left), 18; Frank Joey Suski, 17; Hope Osentoski (fourth from left); 17, and Nora Maloney, 17, share a lighter moment May 15 with the school’s Jaguar mascot, played by Eric Wigginton, a 17-year-old junior.
By SUE SUCHYTA
Sunday Times Newspapers
ALLEN PARK – Some local high school seniors have learned to measure success not by the position they’ve reached but by the obstacles they have overcome.
Four Allen Park High School seniors who have taken on challenges and plan to graduate June 8 share another trait: the ability to rise when they fall and react to the curve balls life throws at them.
SAMANTHA:
LEARNING TO DANCE IN THE RAIN
Samantha Trimble, 18, had little warning about a shakeup when on Oct. 20, 2010 during her junior year she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“I might have been thrown this curve ball where it’s going to affect my life, but I’m going to let it affect me the way I want it to affect me,” Trimble said. “I’m not going to let it control me… I’m not going to stand down to challenges.”
What began as numbness in her hand launched a series of doctor visits and tests that led to her diagnosis of MS, an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and spinal cord when inflammation causes the myelin on nerves to disappear.
She said a saying she heard before she was diagnosed with MS applies to her life now: Life is not waiting for the storm to pass – it’s about learning to dance in the rain.
Trimble said her biggest accomplishment her junior year was going a full five days in a row to school. She said she’d miss school because of headaches, testing, medication issues and hospital stays, and said she took her school work to the hospital just so she could keep up.
Trimble said you can’t let the challenges stop you – you just have to get through it.
She said she turned to her art to vent her frustration and emotions, first drawing and doodling, and later adding ceramics, which she calls “throwing mud.”
She said some of her friends use humor to help her cope, and have made a joke about a past eye patch she wore (for an MS related eye condition now in remission), calling her “Captain Patchy of the mutinous swashbucklers of the SS MS.” She said her friends have planned to wear eye patches one day for a show of support.
Trimble said she now has less tolerance for other people’s complaints.
She plans to go to Adrian College next year to study art therapy. She said she wants to work with kids who have adult diseases.
FRANK:
RAISING HIMSELF
While Trimble plans to work with children with adult diseases as an art therapist, senior Frank Suski, 17, hopes to treat them.
Suski, who plans to study human biology as a pre-med major in the fall at Michigan State University, will be more prepared for life away from home than many of his peers, since he said he’s been taking responsibility for his day-to-day needs since before high school.
He said his life changed when his father was arrested when Suski was an eighth grader. When his father went to prison, his mother started traveling for work. His grandparents, with whom he now lives in northern Allen Park, had a house near where he then lived.
He said he had to learn to take on many new responsibilities, from shopping for food to doing his own laundry. He said he motivated himself to do homework and make sure he got enough sleep. He also got a part-time job with a medical supply company, cleaning and delivering hospice equipment.
“Basically I’ve had to motivate myself to keep myself going to make it through school and make sure I get everything done that I need to so that I can have a successful life,” Suski said.
Whenever his life took a dramatic turn, he said him mother told him that everything happens for a reason.
He finds he thinks more like an adult now than a kid because he had to mature so quickly, and sometimes finds he actually prefers the company of adults.
He said he would tell a peer in the same situation that even though a lot of bad things might happen consecutively and things might seem like they’re not getting better, eventually they will.
HOPE:
LIVING UP TO HER NAME
Senior Hope Osentoski, 17, who also wants to help others, said she would like to be an art or Spanish teacher. She said she was inspired by her Spanish teacher Senora Keisel, whom she said will adjust a lesson plan to fit the learning style of a given class.
Osentoski said she started her senior year with very little focus on graduating, and was more focused on her after-school job, making money and getting by.
She said she was a pretty good kid until she hit her teen years, which is when she started getting rebellious.
She said her parents, who were divorced and both remarried, had pretty much given up on her.
“I got kicked out quite a few times, so I had to deal with finding places to live and buying food and clothes,” Osentoski said. “So at that point this senior year, my first semester, I really screwed up.”
It wasn’t until she realized that she might not graduate with her class that Osentoski began to focus on school again.
“I just decided that I needed to get myself together so I could graduate,” Osentoski said. “My parents had pretty much given up because I was not listening to them. It was not so much that I decided to start listening to them – it was that I decided to do things on my own.”
Osentoski said playing on the school tennis team helped her get through the stress of her high school years.
She said if she has a daughter, she will raise her differently.
NORA:
OVERCOMING FEAR TO HELP OTHERS
Senior Nora Maloney, 17, has found that the challenges she has overcome have made her want to help others as well.
Maloney, who was diagnosed at age 7 with obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia (a fear of crowds, public places and open areas) and severe anxiety, thought she would never be able to attend school, hold a job or graduate.
She said while medication has helped manage her symptoms, she is drawn to working with disabled adults, and now works with a 15-year-old boy with Fragile X syndrome and autism on a daily basis, as well as other special needs children. Fragile X syndrome is the most common single gene cause of autism and the most common inherited cause of mental retardation among boys.
“By working with these kids with disabilities it’s a lot easier for me to get through the day,” Maloney said. “I have so much sympathy for these kids because no one in school really accepted me for who I was; they just (saw) me as someone with a disability rather than what all these kids can do… no one can really see it.”
She said she also worked at a week-long camp for adults with disabilities last summer.
“I want to help them live their life to their fullest extent,” she said.
Maloney said she would like to attend Henry Ford Community College and Wayne State University to become an occupational therapist.
She said that her disability will never go away, but with medication she can control it.