In November 2016, Nicole Stewart, now 19, then a Fort Cherry High School junior, went to her first Powderpuff Football practice. Having never played before, she was told, “Just run after the girl with the ball.” So she did, eventually colliding with another player and sustaining an injury that made it difficult for her to lift her right arm.

When the arm kept hurting, she saw a doctor. X-rays led to a followup scan because “something wasn’t right.”

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At UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh on Jan. 26, 2017, she received the diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma. “I didn’t cry right away,” she said.

Four months after that diagnosis, Grace Lipscomb, who went through Fort Cherry Elementary Center but graduated from Our Lady of the Sacred Heart High School in Coraopolis, was diagnosed with Stage III Hodgkin lymphoma, the same cancer as Ms. Stewart and both in their junior year. Prior to their diagnoses, a young adult who graduated from Fort Cherry but was living nearby in the Burgettstown Area School District was diagnosed with the same cancer.

“Why did this occur? I don’t know,” said Ms. Lipscomb’s mother, Sharon, who lives in Robinson, near McDonald in Washington County. Ms. Lipscomb and Ms. Stewart now are roommates at Clarion University. “I knew there were other older children, prior to Grace and Nicole who had been diagnosed with cancer, and overall it’s very concerning and scary.”

Ms. Lipscomb, 19, is majoring in physics. Her cancer is in remission.

“It was a huge shocker,” she said. “I was scared and didn’t know what to expect and didn’t fully understand it until I went through it.”

Fort Cherry cancer patients also include Catherine Samstag of McDonald, who was diagnosed with a thyroid and lymph-node cancer in March 2016, three months before graduating. Her mother, Christina, confirmed the diagnosis and posted on Facebook the need to move forward and focus on the positives.

“While 85% of people survive with this cancer, you will never again have the quality of life you once had,” she stated. “She has to take medication for the rest of her life to live. She is always tired, clumsy, forgetful. Her hair falls out in clumps. Her skin is dry. She is continually in pain.”

Her thyroid and one lymph node were removed with no recurrence to date. Now 21, she lives at home and works full time in retail.

The cause, Ms. Samstag’s mother said, “has to be something environmental, because there are so many cases.”

“My bigger concern is, here are all these cases with Canon-McMillan and we’re their neighbor. All the fracking is occurring along Route 980 in Canon-McMillan and Fort Cherry Road here. They are fracking in both school districts. That’s what I think is the common denominator.”

One mile east of McDonald, a 19-year-old woman from Sturgeon, a village straddling North and South Fayette, died in March 2018 from brain cancer. She was 17 when diagnosed, her grandmother said.

A GoFundMe account was established in 2015 for a 13-month-old with brain cancer near Midway in the Burgettstown Area School District, near the Fort Cherry border. Her father confirmed the child’s brain cancer but asked that her name not be published.

The tumor was an aggressive anaplastic ependymoma, which was fully removed during surgery. The child, now 5, is doing well, the website says: “She’s back to her normal habits like melting hearts with that nose-squinting smile” and pulling her sister’s hair.

Riley Karn was 15 when he was diagnosed in September 2012 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia after experiencing headaches, weight loss and a lack of energy.

The National Cancer Institute says potential causes of that form of leukemia include exposure to X-rays before birth and exposure to radiation. But linking a specific cancer to a specific cause most of the time is impossible.

Now 21, Mr. Karn, a 2016 Fort Cherry graduate, is studying management of information systems at West Virginia University. His mother, Lisa, says she ponders what might have caused his and the other cancer cases in the Fort Cherry district.

“Now we know about the others,” Ms. Karn said. “I would hope the school will do its due diligence to research these things. I don’t know how much control they have over environmental issues or if it is impacting kids.”

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