Graduates of 2008: School work kept Lake Stevens boy focused

Published 12:54 pm Sunday, June 8, 2008

LAKE STEVENS — Levi Smith felt unsteady.

With good grades, a knack for soccer and basketball and a growing interest in music, the ninth-grader’s future seemed promising, but something wasn’t right. He had trouble standing. During class in Lake Stevens, he felt like was going to topple over.

Yet emergency room doctors said he seemed healthy.

A week later, Smith’s doctor ordered a CT scan. A tumor the size of a golf ball was growing beneath his skull.

The tumor wasn’t cancerous, but because it was close to vital areas of Smith’s brain, surgeons wanted to operate soon.

Over the next few years, Smith spent weeks in the hospital. He endured several surgeries, including a risky 16-hour operation that could have left him paralyzed or deaf. Instead, he temporarily lost his voice and the ability to swallow — not good for an aspiring musician.

For 246 days, he didn’t eat or drink anything. Instead, liquid meals were passed through tubes to his stomach.

Throughout the pain, he prayed, played his guitar and studied.

Smith is among the thousands of students in Snohomish County graduating from high school this spring. Each has a story. This year’s graduates include a Sultan orphan who is the first in her family to graduate, a Snohomish precision machinist who inspired his dad to follow in his footsteps, and elementary school classmates who became valedictorians at Kamiak High School and are now bound for Harvard.

Already enrolled at HomeLink, a home school program that meets weekly with Lake Stevens teachers, Smith continued his classwork.

“School was one of those things I could keep doing,” the lanky 18-year-old said. “I could keep writing and keep doing math.”

In December 2005, doctors pinned a metal halo to his skull. For three months, Smith wore the device to help straighten his neck after surgeons removed a vertebrae and part of his skull. He couldn’t bathe and had to clean the pins daily with rubbing alcohol.

He felt like a freak.

People stared. Kids asked questions. Keeping friends was difficult.

He kept going.

He took the WASL wearing the halo. He laced white Christmas lights around it to lighten the mood.

He was short on credits going into his senior year, but he made up the classes and was accepted to Berklee College of Music in Boston — the same school that Quincy Jones, Melissa Etheridge and Donald Fagen attended.

He’ll receive a degree from the Lake Stevens School District through the HomeLink program.

He plans to take online courses through the college while he undergoes more treatments. A surgery that is expected to improve his quiet, gravelly voice is scheduled for July. In four years, he hopes to be living in Boston, singing rock songs and composing film scores.

“Music helped me be able to express myself when I didn’t feel like I could express myself through talking,” he said, sitting on the couch with his mom, two weeks before his graduation. “I just kept going and God helped me.”

— Kaitlin Manry