By: Kyler Noah, 22, Brain tumor, Non-Hodgkin

My story starts in July of 2025. It was a regular summer for me. I had just finished my third year of my undergraduate, on to my last year of college, working my summer job at a day camp for little kids.

I randomly slowly started to have really bad headaches and was forgetting simple things. Everyone around me was startling to get worried and I went to different urgent cares every week of July. My headaches slowly started to get worse to where I couldn’t go to work and even started having double vision. The last week of July I had severely bad headaches, double vision, sleeping 12 hours everyday, and my personality got more and more mean towards my loved ones. August 1st my dad was looking for me in my house and found me passed out on the floor in my bedroom. He called an ambulance and I went to the hospital.

I was paralyzed and blind in one eye for way too long, I couldn’t walk, could barely talk, couldn’t even grab my napkin from my bed side table. All of my basic motor functions were gone. I was a completely different person. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with me. Every team that is in the hospital came and saw me and nobody could diagnose me, until my first MRI.

They figured out I had some sort of tumor in my brain and then a brain biopsy got scheduled. On August 10th I officially got diagnosed with Primary Central Nervous System (CNS) Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma (ALCL). Now if you know anything about lymphomas, having ALCL is pretty rare, and to even have it only in your CNS is even more rare, only about a dozen of my kind of cancer and the location of it have ever been reported.

After that, it was chemo time. From August 10th-December 30th I had 7 rounds of chemo of some pretty high dose stuff, as my oncologist said “we are gonna tear your body apart.” And he was right. I should mention that from July 17-August 15, give or take a day, I have no memory of, which is for the better. I remember having headaches during my summer job and the next thing in my memory is waking up in the hospital and having everything come back to me very slowly.

That is a weird feeling.

Late August rolls around, I’m slowly starting back as a person again and since I couldn’t walk, I do remember having to rely on a walker to move around. I went to an inpatient physical therapy hospital and spent one week there and was finally able to move around on my own again, but nowhere near as I did before.

To handle school that was supposed to start in September, I took medical leave and cancelled my apartment and my life got put on hold. From September 4-December 26 I went in for 6 rounds of chemo and in total spent 63 days in the hospital in 2025. I had the usual chemo effects, losing hair, fatigue, mouth sores, compromised immune system, and just not having a fun time as a 22 year old, as I should be in college having fun, not stuck at home not being to do a lot of things because I was too tired.

I am glad to say now after a crazy 7 months, I am cancer free, have no more chemo rounds in sight, that I know of, am no longer in treatment and plan to return back to school March 31 for Spring quarter and then for my senior year of college. I am grateful for my family that supported me every step of the way, and I am grateful to be given a second chance at life.