Community comes out in support of stricken teen

HOLLAND — Your senior year of high school is supposed to be one of the happiest, most care free times of your life. Yet for one Grundy Center High School senior, it has become anything but.

The world was Hillary Samo’s oyster. An outstanding student, popular with others and a key player on the Spartans’ state championship golf team, she was looking forward to seeing her friends at school again, enjoying her final homecoming and getting ready for college next year.

Then her world changed.

Having been treated the previous week for bronchitis that her mother, Rhonda, feared had become pneumonia, Hillary returned to the doctor July 30. It was there that they found a mass in her chest … a mass that had not been there when she had an x-ray last spring. Less than 24 hours later, Hillary and her parents were on their way to Iowa City for testing.

“They found that it was a large mass, which they told us about in Grundy, and broke it down to being lymphoma,” Rhonda said. “They pretty much told us that’s what they expected.”

Read the full article in this week's Grundy Register.

See the ad in the paper for the fundraiser for Samo by clicking here.