Taylor’s Story

What I am sharing with you here has impacted me personally. And, I know it impacts over 1,300 Canadian families every year. I’m talking about childhood cancer.

Cancer is the great equalizer. It doesn’t discriminate. It chooses the athletic. It chooses the artistic. It chooses the smart. It chooses the rich and the poor. Really, it chooses whoever it wants.
When I was five, cancer chose me.

The journey begins

In June 1995, I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, cancer of the blood. I remember feeling really sick as though I had a really bad flu. At the time, I didn’t understand what came along with that horrible word cancer. Even as I started loosing my hair, I never fully realized what the outcome could have been. My brother Cody, who is special needs, used to say, “She’s just sick, she’ll be better soon.”

Being sick meant being in the hospital. My family and I spent months at the hospital and it became my playground. It is where I met some of my closet friends—doctors and nurses included.

Many of my friends outside the hospital thought cancer was contagious and so they thought they couldn’t be around me. The night before I was diagnosed, I was at a friend’s house. I wasn’t feeling well so I went and slept in her bed. WELL, when she found out that I had this thing called cancer she was afraid to sleep in her bed because she didn’t want to loose her hair too!
It was hardest on my family and their closest friends. My mom said it was information overload. They felt as though they were drowning in information and they couldn’t do anything to help. But with the help of doctors, nurses and social workers my cancer nightmare was made less frightening.

Losing friends

I grew up fast because of my experience with cancer—hospitals, doctors and the loss of good friends. During the time I spent on Q cluster at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, I had many roommates. Many of them passed away. I felt my first real loss after attending cancer camp in 1996. Heather and I had been roommates when I was first diagnosed. We were much alike. Tom boys I guess you could say. Puddle-jumping and the ropes course were our favorite things. But the following summer, when I went back to camp, she wasn’t there. When I returned home, my mom told me she had passed away. Hearing that at age six made a real impact on me. I knew we would never be at camp together again. I knew she was never coming back.

Cancer and school

Cancer changed my life. I wasn’t able to go to a regular school with my friends. The year I was diagnosed I was to start grade one in the public system but I was enrolled at a private school instead because there were “less germs,” less chance of catching an infection.
In grade three, after two and a half years, or 29 months and 242 needles, my long journey ended and I moved into the big school with all my friends. But because I had missed so much school due to the treatments and the in and out of hospitals, I was behind in my school work. My parents made the decision to hold me back a year, so I won’t graduate with my peers but it’s not such a bad thing. I get one more year to decide what I want to do with my life.
By grade five, I had been in remission four years. Cancer was far from my mind. I never imagined that our family would experience it again.

Cancer again

It was December 13, 2001. My mother was booked for surgery but I didn’t know why. I came home from school and my dad was waiting for me. He told me that mom had ovarian cancer. I felt like I was in some other reality, like I was in someone else’s body, thinking, “Why us, why my family—again?”
I watched my mother go through everything I did—the chemo, the hair loss and the really bad days. But my mom was strong and she didn’t give up. I thank her for that. I can’t imagine life without her, my best confidant, my best friend.
New hope in camp
If there’s one good thing to come of being sick it is the Kids Cancer Care Foundation of Alberta (KCCFA). They opened the door to meeting new people. And, if not for KCCFA, I would have never experienced CAMP! I have been going to camp for 12 years as both camper and counsellor.

Now, picture this.

You pack a huge bag of everything—from shorts to a winter jacket. Why? Because mom is worried about you. Then you and your siblings board a bus and head to the most amazing camp in the world! There are trees, fresh air and it’s sunny out. But most of all, there are kids like you! You sleep on bunk beds, stay up all night and talk about cute boys. And in the morning, you sit with your team for breakfast. When you’re full, you head out for the day and take part in incredible activities—rafting, climbing, high ropes, puddle-jumping, archery, arts and crafts and swimming. After that long day, you go to bed, wake up and do it all over again the next day. When the end of the week comes, you’ve made a bunch of new friends and had the best time of your life. Hands down. And, for an entire week, you forgot you ever had cancer.

Pretty sweet, hey?

Camp is the one place where we are equal. No one judges you because you’re the girl who’s bald or because you have a slight limp due to surgery or because you’re missing a leg. Camp is a magical place. It’s a place you have to experience yourself to really understand.
Camp is where I met my best friend, Danielle. She and I met during our second summer at camp. After attending Camp SunSeeker, which is a ten-day backpacking trip through the mountains, Danielle and I decided to work at camp the following summer. That was last summer, the best summer ever. Eight weeks of camp. It doesn’t get much better.

Lessons Learned

The most important thing I have taken from my cancer experience is realizing how much we take our lives for granted. We need to take a step back and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Really…who chooses cancer? It could choose you tomorrow. You could wake up with a lump, or you could find out that the kid next door has cancer, or worse, your own child. In Alberta every year, more than one hundred children are diagnosed with this disease and thousands more are living with its after effects. Cancer kills more children than any other disease. Two out of every 10 children who are diagnosed with cancer loose the battle.
My oncologist, Dr. Coppes, told my parents: “Taylor has a 60 per cent chance of beating leukemia but there is really no 60 per cent, its either 100 or 0—you either make it or you don’t.” And that’s the reality of childhood cancer. I was one of the lucky ones.

Turning bad days into good days

If you asked me when I was six what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have given you the same answer as now: a pediatric oncology nurse. Nurses were some of my best friends when I was in the hospital. They could make a day go from really bad to really good just by sitting and reading a book when tucking you into bed. I love working with kids and I want to have a meaningful impact on their lives—especially when they are going through something as rough as cancer. That’s my hope for the future—to turn bad days into good days for children with cancer.

Taylor was a KCCFA ambassador in 2007. The above story is taken from the speech she gave at fundraising events around the province that year.