Looking at 18-year-old Colton Boreen today, it would be hard to imagine how far he has come.
The Tsawwassen teen graduated from South Delta Secondary School last month and was awarded the 2013 Shirley Claridge Memorial Scholarship.
The scholarship is handed out annually to an SDSS student "who exemplifies academic diligence and who has experienced or supported another through a difficult life situation," said Shani Dendy, Claridge's daughter.
"Colton is such a humble and kind young man with an incredible life story."
Today, Boreen is the picture of health and physical fitness.
He's active, eats a healthy diet and is even trying his hand at some amateur bodybuilding.
This wasn't always the case.
At the age of four, Boreen was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer. After months of living in pain, doctors at B.C. Children's Hospital found a tumour the size of a grapefruit surrounding his left hip.
It was a rough time for his family. At the same time his younger sister Morgan was diagnosed with a seizure disorder.
"The community helped a lot back then," he remembers, adding that a trust fund was set up and fundraisers were held to help the young family deal with expenses as both children were in and out of hospital frequently.
Boreen endured months of chemotherapy. In the end, the tumour was virtually gone but doctors decided that the chance of a recurrence was too high and he had surgery to remove most of his hip.
While the cancer was gone, this event greatly affected his young life.
He spent months in physiotherapy learning to walk again and when he was mobile again he was unable to participate in many sports along with his peers.
"Throughout my childhood and early teenage years, I was told, and viewed myself, as disabled," he said.
He was not able to do many of the same things that his friends were doing. He remembers not being able to play soccer or ride a bike along with his friends.
"I wasn't physically capable of exerting that much stress on my hip," he said.
He began to gain weight. Due to the removal of his hip and the subsequent misalignment in his body, Boreen developed severe scoliosis (an abnormal curvature of the spine). At the beginning of Grade 9 he had to undergo surgery to correct the problem; he had two metal rods fused to his spine with 36 screws.
After the surgery, Boreen said he went into a depression thinking that he would be severely physically limited for the rest of his life.
"I put on even more weight," he said, adding that he was up over 200 pounds.
At 5'9" tall, the excess weight started creating other health issues.
But one winter morning, everything changed.
Boreen said he isn't quite sure exactly what prompted it, but one morning in January 2012 he woke up and decided that he needed to make a change.
"I went cold turkey," he said. "No more bad food."
He started watching what he ate and exercising, and he lost 20 pounds in the first two months.
His grades also started improving.
"I was just tired of being mediocre," he said.
Boreen said when he started out he was completely ignorant of fitness and nutrition. So he did what he does best, he said, and started researching.
"I read hundreds of articles on diet and exercise," he said, and he started applying what he was learning.
Today, he is down 100 pounds and is even helping some of his friends get into better shape.
Boreen is off to Simon Fraser University in the fall to study physics. He is aiming to get his PhD in physics and become a professor.
