Hayley Annino, 23, is a fourth-year English major and linguistics minor at West Chester University. Annino was 19 and had just finished her freshman year at the University of Delaware when she was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
“Basically, 95 percent of my blood was cancer,” said Annino. “I was more cancer than I was myself.”
Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital first treated Annino with chemotherapy. But after the second session, Annino got blood infections and her situation worsened. She had to be hospitalized for 72 days.
“There’s nausea, burning, bonemarrow biopsies, spinal taps, pic lines, ports, skin rashes, constant IV sticks and, although these were all terrible and painful, nothing did me in like the blood infections,” said Annino in her essay “Why Suffering is Necessary in Appreciating Beauty.”
Annino said that she specifically remembers one day when she woke up with a fever of 106 degrees, uncontrollable shakes and throwing up. “In that moment, I was like: this is it. I’m actually going to die,” said Annino.
Losing hair was one of the saddest parts of the disease, according to Annino. She said, “With the loss of my hair, my figure, my appetite . . . I slowly became a hollowed version of the bright and bubbly 19 year-old I had been just a few months prior. That’s the thing about an acute leukemia, it comes on fast and it comes on strong.”
After Annino was discharged from the hospital, the doctors said that because her body did not respond well to previous treatments, the only way she would survive was through a bone marrow transplant. Luckily for Annino, her oldest brother was a 100 percent match.
Annino was hospitalized again for 40 days and received her bone marrow transplant. The surgery was a success and she was cured. Annino left the hospital just before Thanksgiving 2013 and has not had any major issues since that time.
“If there is one thing that I am certain of,” said Annino, “it is that the collapse of something in our lives offers the chance for something beautiful to grow in its place.”
Annino did one year of beauty school and later enrolled at West Chester University as a full time English major. Annino said that she has applied her experience with cancer in almost all of her classes, and that writing pieces like “Why Suffering is Necessary in Appreciating Beauty” is really therapeutic. “It’s easier for me to write about it than to talk about it,” said Annino.
Annino said that she always had a sense of peace during the difficult process and believes she learned a lot from it. She ends her essay with the following message:
“As humans we tend to take for granted the simple, beautiful things that we see along our journeys, but seeing them for the first time through eyes that have endured the pain and suffering of cancer and the near certainty of death, is inexplicably the most beautiful thing that I have ever experienced.”
Kelly Witman is a student majoring in English. She can be reached at KW860698@wcupa.edu.