Brianna Miller is a 22-year-old from Southern California who was diagnosed with Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma shortly before her 21st birthday. She is a patient at CHOC Hospital. In this five-part series, she takes readers along on her look back at her journey with cancer.
The hardest part about having cancer as a young adult is finding someone who “gets it.” Someone who knows intimately what you are going through, someone who can relate to your struggles from their own personal experience. As much as I appreciate that my family and friends are there for me, and as much as they empathize with me, their level of support is limited to being on the sidelines, but not entirely knowing what I’m going through. Kara, one of CHOC’s child life specialists in the adolescent and young adult (AYA) treatment program, has been so uplifting every time she’s visited and talked to me too, reassuring me that this is all temporary and offering me all of the resources I might need. Even though I had a great team of family and friends, plus everyone at CHOC who cheered me on, it was important for me to find someone who had been through the same diagnosis at the same time in their life.
When I was first diagnosed, my best friend’s mom put me in touch with a family friend of theirs, who is also college-aged and had Stage 2 Hodgkin’s. She was almost finished with her last round of chemo just as I was starting my chemo. I cannot even express in words how helpful it has been having her there to answer questions for me and calm my fears about certain procedures or just the whole experience in general. One moment where I appreciated her support was right before one of my surgeries. I already had a PICC line (a peripherally inserted central catheter, used for long-term medications and for blood draws), but my doctors wanted to remove it and add a port. A port is a device they would insert under my skin and attach to a vein that allows medications, blood products, and nutrients to be given intravenously. I had some anxiety about the surgery and having to get poked often with the port, rather than just attaching an IV to my PICC. She reassured me that the port was more convenient and worth the extra procedure and that definitely helped me feel more comfortable going into surgery.
Although she lives across the country on the east coast, she was always only a text away for me. She was the first person I texted when I shaved my head―I needed to know how long it took to get used to the new look! And, like me, she was also treated in a pediatric hospital, so we shared a lot of the same experiences as a young adult being treated at a children’s hospital. Even now, when I’m close to being done with my own treatment and she’s a few months out from hers, seeing her back at school, healthy and back to normal, makes me so much more excited for when I get to return to school next semester.
The most important thing for me was to find people to connect with, and that’s something that I would suggest to any cancer patient. With social media being so prevalent nowadays, it is so easy to find other people out there who are going through the exact same thing you are. I joined a Facebook group of other people who have fought or are fighting Hodgkin’s, and it has been immensely helpful. Being able to unload concerns, fears, and frustrations onto a large community and have people respond with intimate understanding of your situation is very cathartic. There is a growing number of resources for young adult cancer patients that can be found online, such as Stupid Cancer, and being a part of these communities has given me a sense of belonging when I felt like I had no else to talk to.
Something that I’ve learned over the past six months is that attitude is equal to effort, and it has certainly made me feel better to make an effort to connect with others and find resources to help me through my treatment.
Get more expert health advice delivered to your inbox monthly by subscribing to the KidsHealth newsletter here.
Learn more about the Hyundai Cancer Center at CHOC
CHOC Hospital was named one of the nation’s best children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report in its 2024-25 Best Children’s Hospitals rankings and ranked in the cancer specialty.
