DaytonDailyNews.com

VANDALIA — Around 10 p.m. the night before, Blake LaForce was in the kitchen of his Butler Township home with his parents sitting a few feet away, a collection of photos depicting his football prowess spread out across the nearby table and, just beyond the far window, the snow coming down nonstop.

"I really don't know what to expect," Blake said quietly. "Maybe a few people will show up ... maybe nobody."

The 17-year-old Vandalia Butler junior is many things:

• He's a standout football player for the Aviators. This past season, he was a hard-nosed linebacker and chiseled running back who bulled for 237 yards and three touchdowns on 22 carries against Tecumseh.

• He's a power-lifter of note — dead-lifting 550 pounds, squatting 550, benching 350 — and placed fifth in his 195-pound weight class at one state competition.

• He's a student in the psychology class taught by Trent Dues, who coached Blake in freshman football and, with a smile, described him as "a typical high school kid. He likes the (Cleveland) Browns, football, girls."

• He's also not so typical. On Nov. 6, he was diagnosed with high-risk Acute Lymphoblast Leukemia (ALL). He's going through chemotherapy treatments — that's why he's now bald — and still needs a bone marrow transplant. As for how he's handling this, he's again showing — as assistant football coach Derek Shellabarger put it — "he's a hard worker, a tough kid, just a great kid."

For all that, one thing he is not is a prognosticator.

After that snowy-night speculation, he showed up the following afternoon — Friday, Feb. 22 — at the Just For Looks Hair and Tanning Salon in Vandalia for a shave-a-thon being launched by Dues' psych class to show solidarity for him while also raising awareness about the ease of being tested as a bone marrow donor and collecting some donations for his medical and college fund.

The event — hosted by salon owner Carriann Williams and spearheaded by her niece, Butler senior Megan Hall — was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m., but students began showing up at 2:30.

An hour into the session, there was a line of 15 guys waiting to get their locks buzzed. Dues got his head shaved, so did one girl, lots of football players and nonathletes, even Blake's 5-year-old nephew, Brayden, who allowed the uncle he looks up to so much to do the honors.

By day's end, more than 100 people had gotten their heads shaved, and more than $600 was collected.

"This is just so awesome, I can't believe it," Blake said with a beaming smile. "It's making me feel pretty good."

That's what it was all about, said classmates Kaleb Peck and Mike Baker.

"We want to give him support and maybe a laugh, anything so he doesn't feel like he's any different than us," Baker said.

Peck agreed: "If he needs us, we're here for him. He pretty much has the whole community behind him. That's what's great about living in a town like this. Everybody pretty much knows you or your family — especially Blake. He's gotten all that news coverage with his football.

"He seemed like the most healthy, the strongest person in our class, if not the whole school. Of all people to get this, it's just left us shocked."

A 'special' athlete

As early as peewee football, Blake showed he was quite an athlete.

"I remember one game he scored five touchdowns, and I was like, 'Wow this kid is pretty special,' " said his dad, Mark LaForce, then his coach, before that a lineman on the 1973 Wittenberg national championship team and today a high-tech software salesman.

While he also played hockey for six years, wrestled and still runs track for the Aviators, Blake said he loves football the most. He was coming into his own this past season as the starting middle linebacker and a power running back playing behind a senior.

When that senior was out for the Tecumseh game, Blake got his chance, and as his mom, Linda, said: "He was on fire. Up in the stands, we all were."

But a few games later, those flames began to flicker and cool from extreme fatigue.

"He's a really good, well-conditioned athlete, but he was coming to the sidelines after a big run and going, 'Coach, I can't breathe. I can't catch my breath,' " said Butler head coach Dan Thobe. "It was hard to explain."

Initially, he was treated for some kind of respiratory problem, and though still fatigued almost all the time, he made it through the rest of the season. When a leg injury wouldn't heal, he got checked again and finally had a blood test.

"His white blood cell count was 260,000," Mark said. "Yours and mine are between 4,000 and 10,000."

Linda had a sense of what they'd hear next. A former USAir flight attendant — born in Indonesia, raised first in Holland and then Dayton — she was diagnosed with breast cancer 14 years ago:

"With a blood count like that, I had an inkling it was leukemia."

What makes Blake's so serious, said Mark, is his son's high white-cell count, his age — most kids with ALL are between 2 and 10 — and the appearance of a renegade chromosome that often hides in the spinal column and testes and makes treatment difficult.

None of the family is a bone marrow match, but the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center is searching the worldwide donor registry for possibilities.

With only 10 million people on the list worldwide and few of mixed heritage as is Blake, Mark and his wife are doing everything they can to publicize how to be tested as a donor.

"It's just a swab of the cheek, nothing else," said Mark. For more information he suggested the Web site www.marrow.org or contacting your local Community Tissue Services. In Dayton, the phone number is (937) 388-4483.

Meanwhile, Blake continues treatments, which have included 10 spinal taps — and a couple of spinal leaks that have caused debilitating headaches — while going to school when he can.

"The fist thing the doctor told him to do was get Lance Armstrong's books and read them," Mark said. "They tell how he kept pushing himself through his cancer battles."

Turning to God

While Armstrong offered a lot of tips, Linda came up with one of her own.

"When they found out I had that chromosome, they started giving me stronger treatments," Blake said. "And finally when I'd pull on my hair, some of it came out like they'd said it would.

"One day in the hospital, I'm sitting with my mom trying to think of ways to shave my head. If I cut myself, it probably wouldn't stop bleeding, so a razor was out.

"That's when she thought of putting (medical) tape on it. She got two rolls of it, and while I was getting a blood transfusion, she cut strips of tape, pasted them down on my head, then ripped them off.

"She had me bald in no time."

While tape did that trick, there were other occasions, Blake said, when he and the family needed stronger measures. That's when he reached for the Bible.

"We're all brand-new Christians, and right now God's the only one getting us through this," said Blake's 25-year-old sister, Lauren. "At first I was pretty scared by this, we all were, but now we've found strength."

Blake said he's been helped on that path by E.J. Ramsey, a Wright State student and member of the Christian Life Center, who has taken to ministering Butler athletes.

"One day he gave me a gift," Blake said. "It was my first Bible. Now I read it a lot. You need something (constant) with all the ups and downs that come with this."

More than most, Linda — cancer-free for 13 years — knows that side of Blake's fight:

"Having gone though it, I can relate to Blake. I know the moods and the pain and how it feels to be alone — to feel isolated — even though you are surrounded by people who love you."

A good day

On Friday, Blake was surrounded by lots of love and laughter.

"This is definitely good medicine for him today," Linda said. "This is really bringing out the best in people. It shows people being compassionate of each other. The whole community has come out."

Along with the efforts of Hall and her aunt at the hair salon, Christy's Pizza in town provided food, and the steady stream of ready-to-be-shorn students provided the camaraderie.

As he watched the scene from a corner of the shop, Mark was near tears:

"When you have something like this, you need something to look forward to every day because it's a day-to-day thing.

"This is a good day."

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.