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Teen sends KAHULUI >> A year and a half ago, 16-year-old Naomi Kondo was not sure if she would survive a bout with skin cancer.
warning on cancer
Maui student Naomi Kondo's
bout with skin cancer inspires
an award-winning projectBy Gary T. Kubota
gkubota@starbulletin.comNow, Kondo is not only cancer-free, but also has worked with four other Maui High School students to put together a multimedia production about her experience -- one that recently won a national award after competing with about 150 other high schools.
The production, including a 10-minute video drama and a PowerPoint presentation, was selected last Tuesday as the "Overall Best of Show" at the Third Annual EAST Partnership Conference in Little Rock, Ark.
"The whole point of the program is to make teenagers aware it can happen to you if you're not careful," said Kondo, now 17 and a senior honor student.
After surviving skin cancer, Kondo said she wanted to make others aware of the danger and that EAST -- the Environmental and Spatial Technology program -- offered the vehicle for conveying her experience.
The national program, partially funded through Maui County's Tech Ready initiative, is designed to allow students to work as a team on a project and integrate various academic disciplines in achieving their work objectives.
Kondo said she and her friend Karen Hieda started with the idea of producing a brochure about skin cancer. The concept expanded into a 10-minute video project with assistance from junior Jason Baum and seniors Robert Leeson and Alyssa Smith.
Baum co-wrote the drama with Kondo and worked on the video production with Leeson. Smith was fund-raising coordinator, and Hieda was an actress and helped to produced the brochure. They also enlisted their parents as actors and actresses.
"It was a whole family affair," Kondo said. "It was really funny."
Kondo's mother played herself, and Baum's parents, both physicians, portrayed doctors and allowed the use of their offices as the background for dramatic scenes and a surgery.
Dr. Frank Baum, a practicing pediatrician, portrayed a general practitioner who refers Kondo to a dermatologist played by Jason's mother, Dr. Colleen Inouye.
Kondo's sister Rachel acts as a receptionist.
The drama begins on a beach with Hieda noticing a scar on Kondo and asking what caused it.
As Kondo starts to tell the story, the drama fades to the past with Kondo at a doctor's office. The doctor examines an irregular-looking mole on her left side and refers her to a specialist who eventually confirms that the growth is cancerous and schedules an operation.
Kondo said that in her actual experience, she had gone to dermatologist Dr. George Martin to examine her pimples and remove a wart on a knee in August 2000.
Her mother, Eleanor, asked Martin to look at a mole on her daughter's left side. Suspecting a potential problem, Martin sent the mole for analysis to a medical center in California.
Naomi said a day after the results came back positive, she was in the operating room in Martin's office. A section of skin about 3 inches long and a quarter-inch wide was removed around the mole.
"I was depressed, mentally and emotionally," she said. "The only thing I thought was, 'Is this going to affect the rest of my life? Has it spread to the rest of my body?'"
After her surgery she lost weight and went to 100 pounds from 114 pounds.
She said tests showed the cancer on the mole had not spread to other skin tissue, and there was no need for chemotherapy. But she needs to be checked for cancerous moles once a year for the rest of her life.