LYCOMING COLLEGE 2024 FALL MAGAZINE

By Joe Guistina

he day I was supposed to move into college and everyone got their freshmen T-shirts, a local non-profit, Kids Can’t Fight Cancer Alone, sent me a shirt,” Sydney Taylor ’27 said. “I just thought, ‘How ironic is that?’” In August 2022, a week before leaving Troy, Pa., for Williamsport and Lycoming College, she found out she had Stage 4 Hodgkins Lymphoma. A PET scan at Hershey Children’s Cancer Hospital revealed that was the cause of a lump that had developed on her right arm in May and then a lump on her neck in August. All of a sudden, the David B Sykes Gate had closed, and the next six months contained 12 chemotherapy treatments instead. “My whole life I had been really healthy, so it was a big surprise,” she said. “The first treatment I got, I lost a lot of weight. My body was not expecting what was going on and reacted poorly. Then, toward the end, I got sick a lot. It would take me one week to recover then when I finally felt better, I had to go back.”

18 LYCOMING COLLEGE 2024 FALL MAGAZINE