Laura Bagley has a cold that will not quit. Her doctors say it’s nothing, but she doesn’t agree. She feels different, not normal. Her nose will not stop running, her throat will not stop throbbing, and she’s tired, so tired all the time.

She is working almost forty hours per week while taking twenty units at school. But she’s bored, so she throws herself into her tasks, ignoring her body when it starts to slow down.

Tests and more tests try to assure her everything is okay. Finally, though, her on-campus doctor at the University of Nevada at Reno takes an X-ray of her chest and finds what she fears she will find. Dark spots cloud the film. Blood tests reveal no white blood cells. Laura’s cold is not a cold.

Her heart pounds and her mind races. Her eyes go fuzzy and the room begins to swirl around her. She hears her mother gasp and another voice speaking slowly, calmly and evenly. With tremendous effort, her own voice finally speaks—faint, then shrill. The calm voice begins again, and this time she can hear its words. “Cancer,” she hears. “I’m sorry, Laura. You have cancer.”

Okay, well, I’m sick, she thinks. So what medicine do I need? Whatever it is we need to do, let’s do it. She never thinks of her cancer as actual cancer. She doesn’t think of it as a disease, or think that she might die.

Laura has Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the most curable forms of cancer. It is most likely to be diagnosed in people in their twenties or thirties.

An estimated 74,340 people in the United States will be diagnosed with lymphoma in 2008. Among those new cases, the disease will affect 39,850 men and 34,490 women.

According to studies done by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the cause of this type of lymphoma is unclear. Most cases of Hodgkin’s lymphoma occur in people who do not have identifiable risk factors. The Epstein-Barr virus has been associated with a number of cases, but its precise role in the predisposition to or onset of the disease is still under study.

Laura takes a leave of absence from school and moves back in with her parents. She’s exhausted from the chemotherapy and sleeps all the time.

Immediately, she cuts her hair short, like she’s always wanted, but never had the courage or excuse to. With a handful of friends and her perfect new bob, she marches into a wig shop, just to pre-emptively look around. “We’ll be in the market for one of these pretty soon,” her friend says to the man behind the counter. The man, unaware of what she means and assuming Laura just doesn’t like her new cut, pulls out a selection of clip-in hair extensions and proceeds to try them on her. Laura does not look sick.

But she is sick. Once per week and twice every two weeks, she visits her oncologist for her “Stanford 5” chemotherapy cocktail. She goes to the mall before chemo, and after, too, if she’s not too tired. After her treatments, she feels full and tired like she just ate a big meal.

Just weeks into her treatment, Laura wakes to find a bit too much hair on her pillow. A self-proclaimed “hair phobic,” she shudders at the thought of finding more of her thick hair around the house.

Why am I going to sit around and watch my hair fall out? she thinks. If this is really going to happen, let’s just do this! Without hesitation, she walks into her parents’ bathroom, grabs her dad’s clippers out of the cupboard and shaves off all her hair. She smiles. Her head is cold, but she is liberated.

“It’s depressing (for patients) to wake up to clumps of hair,” explains Marlene McCleary, the patient services coordinator for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. “But if you take control and shave your head, then it’s not something you have to deal with consistently. It’s easier to wake up to a bald head, throw on a scarf or wig and go.”

Laura feels liberated because of her haircut, but she feels angry because of her cancer. She is mean to her parents when they try to help her. “Who gets cancer at twenty? Instead of being sad, the way some people may react, instead of saying, ‘I’m going to combat this,’ I was more like, ‘This is f--king bullshit.’ I was really mad.”

Anger is a common feeling in patients of Laura’s age. It’s similar to a grief process, according to McCleary, because they’re mourning the loss of the person they once knew. “When you’re twenty, you just want to fit in with everyone else,” she says. “You might want to be different, but you don’t want to be known as different just because you have cancer.”

Laura is bitter and has an edge to her that she hides through humor or sarcasm, but she knows it’s all just a cautious way for her to distance herself from the reality of what she is going through.

This isn’t me. This doesn’t define me. This is an illness, and it will go away.

Today, four years later, Laura is in remission, and in one more year she will be considered treated. Her chance of relapse is still there, but her quality of life is too important for her to worry about that
all the time.

“Life either means a lot,” Laura says, “or it’s so fragile that you can’t count on anything. Nothing lasts forever.”