By Joe Guistina he day I was supposed to move into college and everyone got their freshmen T-shirts, a local non-profit, Kids Can’t Fight Cancer Alone, sent me a shirt,” Sydney Taylor ’27 said. “I just thought, ‘How ironic is that?’” In August 2022, a week before leaving Troy, Pa., for Williamsport and Lycoming College, she found out she had Stage 4 Hodgkins Lymphoma. A PET scan at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital in Hershey revealed that the cause was lumps that had developed on her right arm in May and on her neck in August. All of a sudden, the David B Sykes Gate had closed, and the next six months contained 12 chemotherapy treatments instead. “My whole life I had been really healthy, so it was a big surprise,” she said. “The first treatment I got, I lost a lot of weight. My body was not expecting what was going on and reacted poorly. Then, toward the end, I got sick a lot. It would take me one week to recover, then when I finally felt better, I had to go back.” 18 LYCOMING COLLEGE 2024 FALL MAGAZINE
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTA3NDk=