Inspirational Stories

Meet carol. hodgkin survivor. indiana. Carol was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2010. After being a stay-at-home mom, she went back to school to get her teaching degree and found out she had a grapefruit size tumor in her chest when she was one week away from finishing her student teaching. She put off finding a teaching job for a year while going through six months of chemotherapy. She was able to work as a learning specialist while going through her treatments as she had a very supportive principal. Every two weeks when she went in, the nurses and doctors told her she would lose all her hair. She shocked them all because while it got really thin, she never lost it. She thinks because she lived through the 80's with all of the hairspray and went to beauty school, her hair said "bring it on, we have been through it." She has been in remission for almost four years now and is in her fourth year of teaching. Carol's daughter originally put together the "Falcons For a Cure" team for her local Light The Night Walk to honor her. The first year they had more than 60 team members. As the years have gone by, they have sadly had to move some names on the back of their shirts from "honoring" to "in memory of." When her daughter went to college, she handed over the role of captain to a boy who is in remission from leukemia and they continue the team every year. She hopes to see a day when people read about cancer in history books like we do polio!