It happened 29 years ago, but Heather remembers it like it was yesterday.

“Some things a person just never forgets,” she says.

Heather was 9 years old and excited about a family outing to the circus. The next day, however, she felt so ill and tired, she could not go to school. As the day went on, her mom, Phyllis, became increasingly concerned and took Heather to the emergency department of a hospital near their home.

There was blood work, imaging and other tests. Heather heard the young doctor taking care of her mention cancer and leukemia to her mom, but Heather didn’t know what that meant.

Her mom remembers the doctor telling her that they planned to transfer Heather to Johns Hopkins. Phyllis recalls the doctor saying, “The great thing is that you live in a city where Johns Hopkins is.” He assured her it was the best hospital for childhood cancer.

Still reeling from the news, Phyllis and Heather’s five siblings — Team Heather, as they would come to be known — raced to Johns Hopkins to be by Heather’s side. 

It was a lot for the young fourth grader. As she began to learn about the lengthy treatment ahead of her, all she could think about was her friends and school.

“You just want to be a kid. I was 9. I wanted to be outside with my friends, and I was stuck in a hospital. I didn’t understand what was going on,” remembers Heather.

She was angry, but that was OK, that fighting spirit, her doctors said, would benefit her as she began a grueling three years of treatment to destroy the cancer growing in her bone marrow — the body’s factory for blood cells — that was crowding out her healthy blood cells.

Family, friends and classmates sent cards to her hospital room. A volunteer brought her a basket filled with 30 days’ worth of gifts. Heather began to understand she wasn’t going home any time soon. Her first hospital stay was 21 days. She had another that lasted 47 days. When she wasn’t in the hospital, she was going back and forth to the outpatient clinic. Cancer consumed her life.

Waking up every day to a new gift to open provided some consolation, she recalled. Over the years, she’s learned to compartmentalize, keeping the good memories, if one can even call them good, and somehow tucking away in a secret place in her mind, the ones she chooses not to recall.

“Looking back, I don’t want to say that cancer took my childhood, but that’s the kind of relationship I had with it, so I choose not to remember the negative,” says Heather. For her, carrying the bad memories with her would make the experience even worse.

As she recalls her journey, however, a few of the unpleasant memories resurface. The therapy, Heather says, made her feel ill and tired most of the time, but what made her most unhappy was losing her hair. It was the most visible reminder of her battle with cancer. It was the thing that made her look different from her friends and classmates, and she had to go through it three times, with different rounds of treatment that spanned three years. The treatments also left her with some late effects. Heather has diabetes and suffers from some gastrointestinal issues.

Still, now at 38, she says she chooses to focus on the positive.

“The good things are being here today, of course, meeting the people who I met throughout the time, and the support system that I had and still have,” she says.

She also fondly remembers her “I Did It” party. That is the day when everyone on the pediatric oncology inpatient unit celebrates patients who finished treatment. One way patients mark their day is by erasing their names from a board that contains the names of patients being cared for on the pediatric oncology inpatient unit.

Heather with her mom, Phyllis

It’s their way of saying, “Take that, cancer. I’m out of here.”

Heather was 9 when she arrived at the Kimmel Cancer Center in 1994. She was 12 when she wiped her name from the board.

Her battle against cancer consumed the latter part of her elementary school years and most of middle school, so she was ready for high school. She called it “Heather’s New Journey.”

“I had been Heather the sick kid all through middle school. I didn’t want to be that anymore. I just thought, I want to be Heather, not Heather that had cancer or Heather with leukemia,” she says, and high school felt like a fresh start.

“She shined,” recalled Phyllis.

Heather developed a love of finance and accounting during high school. That interest stayed with her, and she continues to work in the field today.

She recognizes that as much as she hates cancer, it helped her become the person she is today. That special spark her oncologist noticed remains.

“I do think that experience is what made me who I am — strong, a fighter,” says Heather. “At 9 and 10, I didn’t realize what it meant then, or what I was fighting for, but now, at this age, I really understand, and it means something different to me today. I had to fight to be here today.”

It has taken her some years to come to terms with her own story, to be able to hate cancer but recognize the good that has come from her experience.

“I don’t want to say I embrace it, but I’m starting to unbury it,” says Heather. “It is a part of me.”

She is planning to start a nonprofit to help other young women though their own struggles.

“I want to create a sisterhood for young ladies who maybe are lost or don’t have anyone they can talk to. If they don’t have that big sister or mom to talk to, they can reach out to us and lean on us,” says Heather. “I feel like a lot of African American females don’t have that support, and I want to be that for them. If it is to help them to get an interview or learn how to dress for an interview, or maybe high school students who can’t afford their high school dues or to go to prom, maybe we can help.”

As Heather looks back on her journey, she says the best outcome of being a survivor was becoming a mom. Her son KJ turned 12 this year. She admits that her battle with cancer makes her worry a bit more. When KJ turned 9, she remembered how her life changed in a moment. She couldn’t imagine that happening to her child. It almost made her not want children of her own. It also gave her a new perspective on the courage and devotion of her own mother.

“I don’t think I will ever stop worrying about my son, and that makes me realize how much my mom when through and how strong she had to be for me. We talk about the kids who go through cancer, but I think the parents experience the most. They might not be getting the pokes and the chemo and everything, but I feel like my mom has been through it all with me,” says Heather. 

Phyllis, on the other hand, sees Heather as the hero in this story, but she is quick to mention a few other heroes.

“I am so grateful to the doctors and nurses,” says Phyllis. She thinks back to the day in the emergency department with Heather when the doctor told her how lucky she was to have Johns Hopkins in her hometown. “They took care of my baby. They fought for her.”