Fulton, N.Y. — The best game of Tim Conners’ senior year at G. Ray Bodley High School in Fulton was one his football team lost.

Conners – six- feet- two -inches tall and 220 pounds – played center, snapping the ball only three times. Fulton drove 60 yards on those plays.

“You could just hear everybody yelling and screaming. The whistles were blowing,” Conners said.

But he couldn’t see a thing.

The 18-year-old Fulton teen lost his sight to cancer in 2010. That football game, which Fulton lost 35 to 7 to Nottingham High, was his first time back on the field. The coaches from both teams worked it out ahead of time: no one would touch Conners.

Conners didn’t get to play in a game again. But today, he will graduate with the rest of his class. He is ranked seventh. When he takes that diploma in his hand, it will be more than an affirmation that he’s a high school graduate. It is a victory against a cancer that at one point had his family gathered around him, saying their last I love yous.

When Conners was 15, he struggled with what a doctor first thought were sinus infections. Then he started having other strange symptoms: half of his face was paralyzed when he had his wisdom teeth removed. On April 3, 2010, doctors found a tumor the size of a football in his chest. He had his first round of chemotherapy that same day.

Chemo had that cancer under control within months, but in July 2010, Conners found out the cancer was back and had spread to his optic nerve. He’d been seeing strange shadows for a while.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2013/06/cancer_took_teens_sight_but_no.html

The darkness began to settle in, seeping into the left periphery of his vision like a rolling fog, resembling a crescent slowly travelling across his view.

He grasped his mother’s face, clinging onto the last straws of cloudy vision.

“If I lose my vision completely, I want your face to be the last beautiful thing I may ever see.”

Then, he was wheeled away into eye surgery on July 15, 2010, and when he woke up, the crescent had become a full moon.

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“Your son has leukemia,” Dr. Irene Cherrick said. “He has a mass the size of a football in his chest. I don’t have time to talk to you anymore — I have to go save your child, and Dr. Trust is going to explain everything to you.”

At 2 p.m. April 3, 2010, the parents of then-14-year-old Tim Conners had just had the air punched out of them. A sudden announcement like that, after being kept in the dark amid a scurry of activity the entire morning, had them sitting in the room on the 12th floor of Golisano Children’s Hospital in Syracuse, New York, with more questions than answers as Dr. Stewart Trust calmly explained to them the ramifications of Tim’s T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

ALL — a quickly developing type of blood cancer, hence termed “acute” — grows in the lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, which are found in the soft part of the inner bone. The cancer attacks by invading the blood and spreading to the body’s vital organs such as the liver and spleen, having a fatal effect within a few short months if left untreated. When caught early, survival rates for adolescents with ALL typically stand around 72 percent. Tim’s variation, T-cell ALL, accounts for 15–25 percent of all cases of ALL in children and adults.

https://theithacan.org/news/the-vision-i-have/

A short doc exploring the obstacles a student at Ithaca College had to overcome after battling Leukemia and losing his eyesight. This story delves into the life of Tim Conners, a man who has persevered and has created a new perspective on life and his future. He may have lost his sight, but he states that he has gained his vision and is capable of seeing the world in a whole new light.

www.MounTimPossible.com – I’m tackling Kilimanjaro in 2017!

College student. Communications studies major. Motivational speaker. Now a first-time author. Soon-to-be summiteer of Kilimanjaro.

The list of descriptors applicable to Timothy Conners is all the more impressive when two more are considered: blind cancer survivor. At 15, he was diagnosed with a blood cancer known as T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia that eventually robbed him of his vision.

Earlier this month, Conners, now 22, released his debut book, titled “It’s Impossible Until You Do It: Succeeding in the Face of Adversity.” Part autobiography and part personal philosophy, the text is intended to present his outlook on living a fulfilling and meaningful existence.

“I wanted to do something that told you about my life, but I also didn’t want it to just be that. I wanted to teach what I’m speaking about,” Conners said.

More than that, the sale of every other book will go toward raising funds for his upcoming trek up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania — the highest mountain in Africa. That effort, which he’s dubbed MounTimPossible, is itself meant to raise money for charitable distribution.

“I really like to pay it forward. So many people and organizations have helped me get to where I am today,” Conners said.

https://www.ithaca.edu/ic-news/releases/ahead-of-kilimanjaro-climb,-student-reaches-new-heights-with-inspirational-book-42882/