01:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 20, 2005

He was 12 and baseball was what mattered. He played six games a week sometimes. He couldn't see a time when there wouldn't be baseball.

So the pain in his left leg was probably from all those games and all that running and turning and throwing. When he went to a walk-in clinic in Seekonk, the doctor told him it was probably a stress fracture.

But the pain persisted. An orthopedist took some scans and recommended a doctor in Boston. In Boston, the doctor said something wasn't right.

Paul Sepe had his first chemotherapy treatment on his 13th birthday. It was the beginning of a personal journey that will bring him back to the place where he learned so much about medicine in a very personal way.

"I'm looking forward to going back to Mass. General after all these years," he says. "And it will be nice to be on the other side of the bed."

He will be Dr. Paul Sepe when he goes back. He will graduate from Harvard Medical School in a few weeks, then begin his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He will become the healer who knows what the patient endures.

When he graduated fourth in his class from Seekonk High School in 1997, he had been through a medical nightmare made all the more draining by its lack of an ending. But it gave him what few graduating seniors have -- a clear, uncluttered look ahead.

"At that point, it was medicine for me," he says. "It was both my illness and the doctors who helped care for me. They were the epitome of what good doctors should be."

He survived a life-threatening disease and admits to a sense of gratitude for what it gave him. The diagnosis when he was a kid with a baseball glove was osteogenic sarcoma, an adolescent bone cancer. It meant surgery and chemotherapy and a terrible uncertainty.

"My biggest thing was that I didn't want to leave my buddies in school. And I wondered if I'd ever play baseball again."

The first round of treatments included the removal of the fibula from his left leg. He finished his freshman year of high school with the help and almost constant presence of his parents, Paul and Geraldine, and friends who brought schoolwork home to him when he couldn't make it to class. There were the Pezzullo brothers, Mike and Matt, and Dave Sloyer, Pat McNulty, Glen Heywood, Ryan Wallace, Jim Paulo and Josh Varone. Sometimes, they just hung out at the house with their friend. And a few years down the road, Varone would introduce him to Caylen Macera, a reading teacher in Cranston who Sepe will marry next summer.

In Sepe's sophomore year at Seekonk High, the cancer reappeared in his right shoulder.

"It was good in a way," he says. "It usually goes to the lungs."

This time, there was surgery at Massachusetts General to remove his right shoulder blade and part of his clavicle.

He felt good at the begining of his junior year. Then the cancer showed up in his right wrist. More surgery and chemotherapy. One thing he has learned, he says, is that there are some bones in the body a person really doesn't need.

In his senior year, the cancer did not return. He went to Brown, then to Harvard. Now, he is 25 and makes wonderful plans that will bring him to that other side of the bed.

He plans to go into oncology, to treat people with cancer.

"I'm fortunate to have had this illness," he says, making perfect sense. "It gave me a different outlook on life. I value every day. I'm not going to sit back and let life go by. That would be a disservice to those who didn't have the chance that I did."

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr [at] projo.com