Academic Over-Achiever and Dowling Catholic Graduate Proved Doctors Wrong: 2012 in Review

Editor’s Note: As 2012 draws to a close, West Des Moines Patch is bringing back some of the stories that made you talk, laugh, cry or just scratch your head. This was originally published on May 24.
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In September 2009, the possibility that Augustine Villa, then a sophomore at Dowling Catholic High School, would walk across the stage Friday to receive his diploma was remote and distant.

It wasn’t that he isn’t smart enough.

At a school known for its academic rigor, Villa is the class valedictorian, a whiz kid among whiz kids, a kid who never got less than an A and who’ll graduate with a cumulative grade point average, weighted with advanced placement classes, of 4.505 – out of a possible 4.54.

No, it's not that he's not smart enough; it’s that he did it with a brain tumor.

For a kid who prepares for a literature test by reading a book two or three times to absorb every nuance of the plot and whose “fun days” were standardized test days, there are worse things than being told you might die.

It's being told you might never learn again.

Villa said he’s “competitive by nature” — a drive that plays out in the quest for knowledge more than in athletic competitions. He’s a swimmer, too, but when he didn’t make varsity, he was content to just have fun and enjoy the experience.

With knowledge, it’s different. Take calculus, for example. “What’s cool is what you can do with it when you have a conceptual understanding,” he said. “It’s hard, but it’s really interesting.”

Doctors Warned of the Worst

The only time in Villa’s life that he has stared down that unacceptable B was when he was having the headaches. He woke up with them and he went to bed with them. He dismissed them as symptomatic of stress – Dowling was, after all, a tough, demanding school. That’s why he had chosen it.

“I couldn’t figure out what was going on,” Villa said. “I was still putting in the time studying, and I’d think I’ve got it, but the next day for the test, I couldn’t remember it.”

The headaches drummed on. Villa started throwing up. He went to a doctor on a Monday and before the week was out, doctors were telling Mike and Joyce Villa — in those hushed tones people use when the news is dreadful — to enjoy what time they had left with their son.

Surgeons made an incision in his abdomen and ran a shunt to his brain to relieve pressure on the ventricular artery at the base of Augustine’s spine, but the tumor was in a sensitive area of the brain.

“We were under the impression that he had only a few months,” Joyce said.

The Villas didn’t tell their son that.

“We were so concerned he would get depressed and not fight,” Joyce said, still choked by the emotion of it. “And we kept thinking, it can’t be right, it can’t be.”

New Doctor, New Plan: “It Didn’t Seem As Bad”

The story has a happy ending. Mike Villa comes from a family of doctors, and they asked questions – a lot of them. Those landed him at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, where Augustine said his lead physician insisted from Day One, “We’re going to beat this.”

He took the doctor at her word.

“I kept myself on auto-pilot,” Augustine said. “As doctors were telling me this or that, I wasn’t thinking about the end consequence. The doctors had a plan for me to get better, and when it’s a plan, it doesn’t seem as bad. Just follow the plan and you will get better.”

Augustine remained in the hospital for chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He said he’d rather face a big needle than go through another surgery to insert a port for the anti-cancer drugs. While other teenagers on the floor were pulling harmless hijinks on the medical staff, Augustine was absorbed in his books, keeping up.

During his treatment, he took the national AP exams in European history and in chemistry. He aced both.

“When he wasn’t sleeping or sick [from the cancer drugs], he had books all over the bed,” his mother said. “When he was awake, he was studying.”

As it happens, Augustine is as much of an over-achiever in fighting cancer as he is at figuring advanced calculus logarithms. His scans came back clean after chemotherapy. The radiation that followed was just to be on the safe side.

“We got lucky with the type of tumor it was,” Villa said. “It was a germinoma, and germinoma is rare in that part of the brain. The doctor was 99 percent sure it was something else that would have taken 10 months for treatment.”

Augustine has been cancer-free since then and says there’s less than a 5 percent chance the tumor will return.

He admits to being at somewhat of a loss as to what to do after graduation – for the two weeks immediately after it, that is.

In June, the kid who “asked a ton of questions” of his medical team during cancer treatment will begin an internship at Iowa State University, where, wouldn’t you know it, he’ll be shadowing a cancer cell research team.

At Iowa State, he plans a double major in chemical engineering and physics and a minor in Spanish.