Angie Pirog cradles her guitar in her lap, head down, long graceful fingers playing chords.

Her dark hair is cropped very short and she is sitting in a wheelchair.

“Coming home on a dark, dark, dark night/Sing a song and make it bright,” the 17-year-old croons in a soft, sweet Celtic-tinged voice that fills the bright living room of her Fleetwood home.

She wrote the song herself, about two years ago.

That was when her right knee was really beginning to hurt.

It got so bad Pirog had to quit track and field. A year later she had to quit competitive dance.

Up until then, she would regularly participate in the annual Terry Fox run.

Like all Canadian students, she’d been taught the story of the young man who lost a leg to bone cancer and ran across the country in 1980 to raise money for cancer research.

She’d seen photos of Fox running with his distinctive hop-and-jump gait, his support van following behind on a lonely rural road during his Marathon of Hope.

It was hard to think of that heroic image as a real person.

When Pirog could barely straighten her swollen leg, she was sent in for an MRI.

“I have some bad news for you,” the doctor said.

She had bone cancer and her leg would have to be amputated.

Then another tumour was discovered, pressing against her lower spine.

Shortly after she was admitted to hospital, she lost all feeling from her waist down.

She spent six months in hospital, enduring repeated rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

She slowly regained feeling in her lower body, with the determined aid of friends and family who would rub her feet for hours at a time to ease the constant pins-and-needles sensation.

Surgeons amputated Pirog’s leg at her right knee, but re-attached her right foot so the ankle functioned as a replacement joint, allowing better mobility with her prosthetic leg. In the process, the foot was deliberately reversed so that it points backwards.

It makes painting her toenails tricky, but she manages.

Pirog has a different perspective on Terry Fox now. He was a human being who struggled with anger, pain and fear and is even more of a hero because of it.

“Terry was one of us.”

Pirog didn’t realize exactly how much she had in common with Fox until her aunt Tami Foster suggested she should participate in this year’s run on Sunday, Sept. 14.

After all, Foster noted, her niece had contracted the exact same kind of bone cancer in the same leg as him. Who better to serve as a “sort of unofficial” spokesperson?

So on Thursday, she picked up a racing wheelchair for the five-kilometre event in Tsawwassen, where her aunt is a volunteer.

Pirog isn’t allowed to use her prosthetic leg right now because bone cancer has been detected in her pelvis and she is not supposed to physically stress it while undergoing treatment.

She continues to write songs and performs in local coffee houses (she will be appearing at the Petra’s Arts Kafe at 1200 56 St. in Tsawwassen from 7-8 p.m. on Sept. 12).

Some of her original tunes can be heard on her MySpace page along with her cover of a Matchbox 20 song called “3 a.m.”

It’s about the time lead singer Rob Thomas spent caring for his cancer-stricken mother when he was 12.

For information about local Terry Fox runs, visit www.terryfoxrun.org

dferguson@surreyleader.com