Childhood Cancer Warrior Spotlight: Meet Taylor

Written in her own words

When I was 12 years old, I had what I thought was a very bad sinus infection for 3 weeks. I had always had seasonal allergies, so being sick in the spring was not very unusual. After a few weeks with symptoms progressively getting worse, I went to my pediatrician. When he went to listen to my breathing, we could read in his face that something was wrong. I was sent to the emergency room for an x-ray, and by that night I was in an ambulance on my way to New Orleans Children’s Hospital.

The next day I was in a major surgery where lymph node and bone-marrow biopsies were done, along with the insertion of a port and chest tube to drain the fluid in my check. I was on a ventilator for 24 hours, and when I woke up on April 1st 2018, I was diagnosed with Stage 3B Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There was a tumor the size of a soft ball located between my heart and left lung, and by the time I was brought to the hospital, 80% of my lungs had been compromised by tumor or fluid in my lungs.

That week I started my first of five rounds of chemotherapy, which made me very sick. Each cycle was twenty-one days. I lost my hair, and I felt very sick most of those days. After about six months of chemotherapy, I had fourteen days of radiation. As a 12-year-old, it was very scary hearing that I had cancer. Up to that point, I always thought that cancer meant that you were not going to survive. I am very thankful for the help of my family; they were such a light and an amazing support system for me and still are to this day. I will forever be grateful for my family and will always remember the love that they showed me and the support they gave me during one of the worst times of my life.

While cancer can be cured for some, it is something that sticks with you for your whole life. My experience is such a big part of who I am, even seven years later. Today I am seven years out from treatment as of September 18th 2025. I am a student at Louisiana Tech University majoring in biology with business administration and chemistry minors. I hope to get a job doing cancer research in the future to help put an end to this terrible disease and the long and excruciating treatments for it.

Taylor Langley, 19