By Eleanor Wilson
On the morning of Monday 12 December, almost 50,000 students across Victoria nervously opened their computer screens to reveal the pay off of two years of studying, tests and exams.
For Nossal High School student Poppy Clemence, opening her ATAR represented the closing of a chapter, in more ways than one.
Attending competitive, select entry school Nossal High, academically gifted Poppy had high hopes for VCE.
But that all came crashing down in October 2021, when the Pakenham Upper resident suffered from a collapsed lung.
“I was just sitting on the couch at home when it happened so it came out of nowhere and we didn’t know at the time what had caused it,” she recalled.
“I underwent surgery and I thought everything would go back to normal after that, because collapsed lungs can be common in teenagers,” she said.
But a routine biopsy of a cyst removed from Poppy’s lung revealed a darker catalyst for the medical incident.
“A couple of weeks after my surgery we received a phone call from the doctors, who said we needed to come in urgently,” she recalled.
“So we went in and they said what caused my lung to collapse was synovial sarcoma.
“My world was turned completely upside down.”
A rare form of cancer, synovial sarcoma is typically found in soft tissue such as muscle or ligaments.
Poppy represented one of just ten documented cases of synovial sarcoma on the lung in adolescents, she said.
After the diagnosis, she was thrust straight into chemotherapy and radiation therapy, moving to Melbourne temporarily for five to six rounds of each treatment between November 2021 and March 2022.
This meant a great disruption to her learning – completely missing out on her last term of Year 11 and first term of Year 12.
“I tried my best to do some online work but I was really sick most of the time,” she said.
It also put her larger passion for equestrian riding on hold, which, she said, was particularly difficult to deal with.
“It was a big deal for me not to do that, I’ve been riding horses since I could walk.
“I spent my entire time in hospital watching my horses and other people’s horses on YouTube, I was very motivated to get back into it as soon as I could.”
Thankfully, Poppy is now on the mend and feeling much better, meaning she’s back to riding her show horse Finn, whose show name is The Gruffalo.
When it came to the remainder of her VCE, Poppy said her health scare may have, in some ways, helped her cope.
“I think going through all of this took some of the anxiety away, it put everything in perspective and I knew I had tried my best.”
She graduated with an ATAR score of 89.20, which Nossal High School principal Roger Page called remarkable.
“I’ve been most impressed by Poppy since day one really. She’s been a very active participant in a lot of areas of school life and the programs we offer… so we were quite devastated when we heard of her illness,” he said.
“Her resilience was remarkable and the fact she managed to participate fully in the school program is a real testament to her determination and desire to overcome the devastating illness she’d been hit with,” Mr Page said.
“She performed exceptionally well, achieving a very creditable score in spite of the circumstances she’d been dealt.”
Poppy plans to take a gap year in 2023 and has been offered a place at Canberra’s Australian National University, where she plans to study a Bachelor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
