It's weird to say it, she knows. But Lora Webster still does.
"I am grateful for what cancer has brought me," she said in a phone interview on Wednesday from her home in New York, about 20 years after she was diagnosed with the disease as a sixth grader at Lincoln's Lux Middle School.Â
There are caveats, of course. Webster's relationship with the disease that took her left leg before she started high school at Lincoln East is, predictably, complicated.Â
"I lost my leg, yes," she said. "But we lost our peace of mind. Because once the worst-case scenario has happened, ... you don't forget that. Every weird pain, every weird twinge — it's either the symptoms of chemo, the side effects of chemo, they told me to worry about or it's a secondary cancer. Or it's reoccurrence."Â
"You never have peace of mind again," she said, but she insists there are reasons to give thanks.Â
There is the Paralympic career the disease made possible.
There is her husband, Paul, whom she met while playing at a volleyball tournament in New Orleans in 2006. Webster, 34, is 18 weeks pregnant with the couple's fourth child.
"That's not the case for everybody," Webster said. "And I am reminded of that often, and I am forever grateful for that."Â
Webster was packing a bag for Tokyo as she spoke on Wednesday, 10 days away from the USA Women's Sitting Volleyball Team's debut at the 2021 Paralympic Games, where Webster, the team's longest-tenured player, will appear for the fifth time.
She was barely 18 years old — only a few years removed from her days on the standing volleyball team at Lincoln East — when she led Team USA to a bronze medal in Athens in 2004. Webster played at East for two seasons in the early 2000s before her family moved to Cape Creek, Arizona.Â
Her relationship with cancer has evolved since then, but it has always seemed unique. On her first day at her new high school in Arizona, she wore shorts, her father, Dale Webster, recalled this week.Â
"That told me a lot right there," he said from his home near Phoenix. "She was — I think she was making a statement."Â
Webster's relationship with volleyball has evolved, too. Her dad remembers an initial apprehension to the seated variation of the sport. She didn't think it was really volleyball, Dale Webster said.Â
The United States had never fielded a women's sitting team at the Paralympics when organizers first approached Webster, still a high schooler, in the early 2000s. Dale Webster remembered the first practice for the newly organized team as "an abysmal display." But he was still amazed.
"When you're surrounded by 15 people with varying ... physical impairments, it was just striking," Dale Webster said, pausing, "That there were other people out there like her."Â
In the high school season before she and the country made their sitting volleyball Paralympic debuts, Lora Webster helped lead her standing volleyball team to a state championship, her dad said.Â
But it was a far cry from the global stage, where other teams had established national sitting volleyball teams long before the grassroots group that would represent the United States came together.
"We weren't expected to be anywhere near the podium," Webster said.Â
Dale and Webster's mom, Sandy, were on hand in Athens to watch as the team claimed bronze.Â
The 17 years since have brought similar waves of unexpected good fortune to Webster, who has twice been named the Sitting Player of the Year.Â
The sport is how she met her husband, who was playing on a standing men's team at the New Orleans tournament, invited to play against the sitting women. She left their children — 10, 8 and 6 years old — with him in New York on Friday when she boarded a flight bound for Tokyo.
There is guilt that comes with that, Webster said, one that didn't exist in Athens or Beijing, where the team took home silver in their second-ever trip to the Games in 2008. Â
"It's a huge weight on me to leave them," she said.Â
But Webster has kept going, and the medals have kept coming. The women took silver again in London in 2012 before finally striking gold in Rio. It was "the highest high for any athlete," Webster said. She was named best blocker for her performance in those Olympics.Â
As she packed for Tokyo, one of the most decorated sitting volleyball players the country has ever seen was stressed out, she said. COVID-19 protocols will prevent her family from making the trip to Tokyo, and the virus had already upended the team's travel plans. The cloud of uncertainty hanging the Olympic Village was palpable, even as she hadn't yet boarded her flight there.Â
"This Games doesn't count, kind of, in some ways," Webster said.Â
But she is going anyway — a fact that is still a source of awe for both Webster and her father, one they couldn't have foreseen during her chemotherapy treatments in Lincoln, when Webster said she didn't even know that sitting volleyball existed.Â