After a long fight with cancer, a Sabattus man earns his diploma and “Courage to Grow” award.

SABATTUS – When chemotherapy’s cancer-fighting poisons attacked Erik Poulin – stealing his hair and more than 30 pounds from his thin frame – it also robbed him of school.

The Oak Hill High School senior dropped out in the fall of 2006.

“I tried, but I was too weak,” he said. “I just wanted to sleep.”

It was the start of a torturous year for the teenager.

After six months of searching for an answer to his chronic congestion and perplexing black eyes, doctors found a cancerous tumor in Erik’s left sinus cavity.

“It was big, real big,” said Marie Poulin, Erik’s mother. The inoperable growth had been pushing against his left eye and was growing rapidly.

So Erik endured 13 rounds of chemotherapy and 30 radiation treatments, sometimes overlapping their debilitating effects.

“I’d unplug the chemo tube long enough to go to the radiation,” he said.

The treatments went on for a full year. When they were done, so was the tumor.

“They did everything the doctors said they would,” Marie Poulin said. Scans showed only scar tissue where the tumor had been.

But the ordeal left Erik profoundly weak. Within two months of the final treatment, he tried to return to Oak Hill, beginning with a shortened day. It didn’t work.

“I was wiped out when I got home after just two classes,” he said. He also felt like an outsider.

“I was still underweight,” he said. “I looked terrible.”

And his own class had already graduated.

“I knew nobody,” he said.

After two more months of recovery to build his strength – and to let his hair grown in – he tried again. This time, he went to Oak Hill Adult Education. The quieter, nontraditional atmosphere worked.

“I thought, ‘I can really do this,'” he said.

He took one class at first. Then two. Within about 15 months, he earned the credits he missed by leaving high school.

“When I wasn’t in school, I realized that I really liked school,” he said. The “average student” became dedicated. He found that English classes came back the easiest. Picking up where he left off with math was harder.

He did it, though.

On Thursday night, Erik, 19, is scheduled to graduate.

He’ll pick up his diploma at the Oak Hill Adult Education commencement. He also is scheduled to receive a “Courage to Grow” award.

“I couldn’t think of anyone else who deserved it more,” said Jim Palmer, the director of the Oak Hill program. The award is given by Central Maine Community College and includes a scholarship for one class at the school.

Erik plans to attend CMCC in the fall and study business administration. Whatever he does after Thursday will be experienced as a healthy survivor, he said.

“I always felt graduation was the last hurdle I had to pass to feel like I was over the cancer,” he said.