When medical student Mark Owen did his pediatric oncology rounds, he would tell young patients, "I've had chemotherapy. I know what it's like to feel sick and have your hair fall out and have mouth sores." Now Dr. Owen is a doctor at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, specializing in Family Practice medicine. And he often comes in contact with young cancer patients. Recently he was in the Emergency Room when a boy was brought in with a pain in his leg which turned out to be osteoscarcoma (bone cancer), and Dr. Owen is following the progress of that case very closely.

It was just a little over ten years ago, the week before Mark Owen was to graduate from the little high school in Bernice, Louisiana, that he was diagnosed with bone cancer in his left leg. The valedictorian of his class, he didn't get to walk down the aisle with the other graduates. Instead, he spent that evening getting settled in at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

He endured four months of chemotherapy, then prepared for limb salvage surgery which would remove the tumor and save his leg. But the day before the operation he stood up suddenly from where he was sitting on the hospital bed, and he broke his leg. Now faced with difficult choices, the young patient and his physicians opted for amputation above the knee.

"Initially, it was not a big trauma. I had watched 'Six Million Dollar Man.' I thought it would be easy," says Owen. But he found that the adjustment to his artificial leg was not easy, and there was a lot of pain. He missed a year of school before he could start college. First he used crutches, then one crutch, then a cane. Eventually he walked unaided into the Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

He never would have gone to medical school if it hadn't been for his chemotherapist at M.D. Anderson. "We became good friends. I helped him with his computer, I went to his house. He was my role model," says Owen. With his soft Texas drawl he adds, "I was a science 'nut' as a kid. Then, at the hospital, I saw a way to put science to use."

And there was another reason for going into medicine. "Going through this, I met a lot of people, other little kids. Some of them didn't make it." After his residency, he would like to do bone tumor research.

These days, Dr. Mark Owen is a role model himself. He offers young cancer patients and their parents the perfect image of what aggressive cancer therapy can do for a young person, turning their healthy lives into a gift to the world.