Date Posted: 5/5/2008

BUIES CREEK, N.C. - The shower provides all the cover she needs.

The rushing water drowns the sound of her sniffles. The curtain hides the pain in her face. Only in there, where nobody can hear her, where nobody can see her, where nobody can feel sorry for her, Amanda Littlejohn cries.

One tear after another washes down the drain until she's cleaned out. Then she towels off and puts on an outfit of smiles and happiness.

It's not always easy, grinning at cancer. Sometimes even the most positive people need a little time to be sad.

But Amanda - a sophomore standout on Campbell University's softball team who was found to have a severe form of melanoma last year - does her best to leave it in the shower.

"I don’t want people to see me upset," Amanda said. "I don't want them to see me as weak."

Through her first 18 years, Amanda couldn’t even collect the courage to have her ears pierced. She cried during flu shots.

But since doctors told her she had the worst form of skin cancer last May, Amanda, now 19, has been violated by needles and scalpels more times than she can remember. She's had four surgeries — two on her face, one on the lymph nodes in her neck, and one on her right forearm — as doctors stalk this disease from one mole to the next.

She lost her right eyebrow. She has a scar along one of the crease-lines in her neck. And, as if she needed another cruel kick, doctors accidently clipped a nerve in her lower lip during one of the surgeries, leaving her with a lopsided smile.

Amanda flies home to California every three months so doctors can scan her body for a recurrence of the cancer. With each clear test, Amanda gets another step closer to beating it.

For two weeks every month, the last thing she does before going to bed each night is give herself a shot in the stomach.

Still, she's never missed a start. She's batting .369 and set Campbell's single-season RBI record.

"She's having an all-region, all-American type of year," Campbell coach Drew Peterson said. "But she has to give herself injections every day for two weeks a month. Not many young ladies could handle that type of thing, let alone act like they aren't distractions."

It's more than an act, though. It’s a frame of mind. It's her daily uniform in a painful fight that began in December 2006 with an annoying bump on her right eyebrow.

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