Meet Emma: 2024 Scholar
Our College Scholars receive a financial scholarship to help with academic expenses, and each scholar commits to undertaking a volunteer project of their choosing related to childhood cancer advocacy, with support and mentorship from the Children's Cancer Cause team.
Emma’s Story
Emma was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was 17 years old, during her senior year of high school.
“As you go through life you acquire labels. These labels can be earned, given, honored, or beaten, but all of these labels you attain through the path that life takes you on,” says Emma.
“The ‘cancer kid’ label was stamped on me very quickly when I lost all my hair and my skin turned the color of ash once chemo started. The cancer kid label began to overshadow and block the other labels I had earned in my life when I could barely bring myself to leave my hospital bed. The label began to consume me. It took over my life and became my only identifying factor.”
Emma’s treatment lasted four months, and she was deemed officially in remission just in time to get ready for college. But she’d lost feeling in her fingers and wasn’t able to write or type. She battled through neuropathy with an occupational therapist in order to regain fine motor skills that treatment had zapped from her.
“People do not realize that when you go through cancer or another traumatic event on your body, that it is not just the treatment that is difficult, but everything that comes after as well, both mentally and physically,” she shared with us. “The recovery is just as hard as the journey, and that is why we need occupational therapists to help and motivate patients along the way to regaining back parts of their lives they had lost or had never had before.”
Unfortunately, Emma relapsed during her freshman year of college. This time, she needed radiation in addition to chemo.
“Last time the cancer kid label had overshadowed and drowned out my other labels in my life, but this time I was determined not to let that happen,” Emma said. “I would maintain my ‘student’ and ‘psychology major’ labels by continuing my college education online for my sophomore year while undergoing cancer treatment at home. I guess you could add ‘determined’ to my label regiment as well.”
Today, she’s a grad student working toward her doctorate in occupational therapy at A.T. Still University.
”It has now been four years since I have borne the label of ‘cancer kid,’” she told us in the spring of 2024." “I am now working towards new labels. I hope to one day have the label of ‘pediatric occupational therapist.’ I have seen firsthand what an OT can do in the lives of children, including myself, and I want nothing more than to be able to return the favor to the children who need it most one day."
Emma’s Advocacy Project
Emma’s project aligns with her doctoral capstone. In the 2024-2025 academic year, she’ll be studying the impacts of a cancer diagnosis on the family unit and some of the barriers to receiving support and care.
As part of this work, she’ll be creating and implementing a support group for parents who are undergoing cancer treatment themselves and helping to facilitate a survivor support group.
Related specifically to pediatrics, she’ll be working with local groups to recruit families and conduct a needs assessment around the barriers to raising a child with cancer. Emma plans to break down some of those findings in a guest blog post that we’ll share here in the spring of 2025.
“By better understanding the needs of families affected by childhood cancer, we can better advocate for specific supports and access to care.”