Miami freshman doesn’t let cancer get in her way

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Megan Metcalfe weathered a bout of cancer during her last two years at Hamilton High School but is right as rain now as a freshman at Miami University.

Staff photo by Richard O Jones Megan Metcalfe weathered a bout of cancer during her last two years at Hamilton High School but is right as rain now as a freshman at Miami University.

HHS grad says teens need more support

By Richard O Jones, Staff Writer Updated 7:06 AM Friday, October 16, 2009

OXFORD — First-year Miami University student Megan Metcalfe says she learned two things during her two-year battle with cancer.

Metcalfe missed much of her junior year at Hamilton High School, but managed to be part of the cheerleading squad during her senior year while still undergoing follow-up chemotherapy to treat her non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

First, she said, is to “appreciate everything.”

“I really learned to appreciate home more,” she said. “Overall, if you added up all of my stays in the hospital, it adds up to about 90 days.”

Second, she said, is to make cancer fun.

“I don’t know if it was just my way of dealing with it, or if it was just part of my personality, but there’s no way I was going to be all down and serious about it,” she said. “I liked making people  uncomfortable when I would catch them staring at me. The thing I hated the most was people staring at me because I was bald.

“And I didn’t care how much chemo they were pumping into me, I’m hanging out with my friends. I tried to maintain as much of a normal life as I could.”

Metcalfe also said that someone ought to write a book to help teenagers deal with cancer, and that she might be the one to do that.

“I wasn’t really into reading a bunch of books about cancer,” she said, “but that may have been because I couldn’t find anything geared toward teenagers. There’s lots of books for little kids and a lot for adults, but nothing for me.”

The closest thing she found, she said, was a book “Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips” by Kris Carr, but even though she loved the title, there wasn’t much to help her.

“She was in her 20s, so there were things about getting your finances in order,” she said. “But I was 17. I didn’t have to worry about finances.”

She didn’t find much in the way of peer group support either, but now that she’s part of a larger community of people her own age, she’s hoping to find other cancer survivors at Miami University to start a support group and to help take away some of the stigma attached to cancer.

“I know people who are going through all of this and won’t even tell their family,” she said. “And I want people to stop trying to hide it, to not wear wigs and scarves.

“If we try to make people believe it doesn’t exist, they will.”

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.

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