“I left school and went home and left everything behind, just to get this surgery."-Molly
Molly's Story
Molly O’Neill was a normal, healthy 20-year-old TCU student before she was diagnosed with stage 3b ovarian cancer adenocarcinoma.
It all began when she noticed that, “things weren’t quite working the way they were supposed to.”
She was having many irregularities with her menstrual cycle and other bodily functions, including missed periods, an unusual flow, and strange discharge that she wasn’t used to.
These irregularities led Molly to the gynecologist to figure out the issue at hand, but it took a full seven to eight months for doctors to take necessary action. No doctor thought it was anything outside of the norm, especially in someone so young.
Once doctors finally took action, they told Molly that she had to have emergency surgery. Within three days, she decided to take time off from school and have the surgery.
“I left school and went home and left everything behind, just to get this surgery,” said Molly.
It was during surgery that doctors discovered that she had cancer.
During surgery, doctors removed Molly’s ovaries, uterus, appendix, gallbladder, omentum, part of her bladder, and part of her small intestine.
Coming out of surgery, Molly was notified of her diagnosis, and due to her state after surgery, she wasn’t able to have much of a reaction.
“Obviously I knew what was happening,” Molly said. “I knew I should be really upset. I cried a little bit, but there was just so much other stuff going through my body that I don’t think I really processed it until maybe two weeks later.”
Once she processed it, she was ready to conquer the disease head on.
“For about two minutes I was sad," Molly said. "Then after I was done being sad about it something switched in my brain and I just decided like, ‘Okay, what do we do next? I can’t be upset about this because I need to take action and fight it!’”
Molly’s parents were standing right next to her hospital bed when she was diagnosed and had a much more severe reaction. The first thing her dad asked was if there was anything Molly wanted to do. Anything at all, he was going to make it happen for her.
“I knew that he was implying if there was anything I wanted to do in my life or if it were to happen, where I was going to pass, he wanted to make it happen so I could, you know, pass on without any regrets,” she said.
As a Colorado native, Molly chose to withdraw for the semester to be home and properly recover from her surgery. The recovery period was much longer than the university would allow her to miss.
Content with taking the semester off, Molly was now set to graduate on time, rather than early.
This became the hardest adjustment for two of her best friends, Lauren Rasins and Libby Taussig, not physically being there for Molly while she was in so much pain.
Lauren felt like she was never going to see Molly again, even though she knew she would.
After a while, “It was literally like she was on a study abroad.”
Libby just couldn’t believe this was happening to someone so close to her.
“Not being there was really hard because I could tell it was hard on her and I wasn’t there to help her through it,” Libby said. “It was the unknown, not knowing if it's going to work or all of that, or the possibility of her not making it was scary at the age of 20. You don’t really have to deal with that often with people you are very close with.”
Libby and Lauren both felt like they were the ones being taken care of by Molly, when they felt like they should have been the ones taking care of her.
“I think I broke down more than she did,” Libby said.
Molly took to social media to announce her diagnosis to friends and family. She posted on her Facebook timeline because it was easier for her, especially right after surgery.
“It was much easier for me in the hospital to send out a mass message on Facebook to let everyone know than it was for me to text the important people, and then text the next most important people, and then day after day texting everybody to let them know what was happening with me,” Molly said.
Molly didn't want to deal with hundreds of text messages, but she did want to include people so she wouldn’t have to deal with the disease on her own. She was scared and didn’t know what was going to happen.
According to Molly, most of her family and friends were very supportive, but there were also some who disappeared.
“People came out of the woodwork that I didn’t even know really cared,” Molly said. “They reached out to me, they would express how they’ve been effected by cancer in their families, and if I needed anything, just please contact them because they would be right here for me. It was really pretty great.”
For Lauren, finding out Molly had cancer was one of the toughest things she ever had to cope with. Her mind went completely blank because her mother had just been diagnosed with stage 1 ovarian cancer a year prior.
“When Molly was telling me about her diagnosis, I kept hearing what my mom’s doctors were telling her about what happens at stage 4, and it was just a really hard thing,” Lauren said.
She didn’t know how to deal with that level of emotion since Molly is such a good friend of hers. It was also hard for her because she wanted to be there to support her, but since she was in Colorado, she couldn’t physically be there for her.
“But we did really talk a lot, so it really helped the transition,” Lauren said.
Immediately after recovering from surgery, Molly began treatment.
She had to have two very different types of chemotherapy. The first one was only once every 21 days, but it was a 12-hour treatment where she was being pumped with fluids throughout the day.
The second regimen was more frequent. She had chemotherapy on days one, seven, and eight across a 21-day span. She was being pumped with less chemo, but it was much more invasive than the first regimen.
Molly had very different reactions to each chemotherapy treatment. Some made her very achy making it feel like she had arthritis, and some would make her nauseous and sluggish.
For most of her chemotherapy treatments, Molly was unable to walk, which made it difficult for her to be distracted from it. But, she would have to take allergy medications before each treatment as a precaution to prevent any allergic reactions to the chemotherapy drugs. When she wasn’t sleeping from the allergy medicine, she tried her best to keep busy.
“To keep my mind on other things, I would just have so much sensory overload at one time,” Molly said. “I would have the TV on, I would have like some sort of book, or like Sudoku, or some kind of mind engaging puzzle. I just kind of overloaded my mind with all other things possible so I didn’t have to think about it or think about things I was missing out on.”
To help keep Molly distracted during her treatments, Lauren would ask Molly to help her study over the phone. She also tried not to ask too much about her cancer or chemotherapy, unless Molly was the one to bring it up. In reality, Lauren didn’t know how to deal with the whole situation.
“I knew that other people were talking to her about it, and I just didn’t want to be that friend,” Lauren said.
Having left and come back to TCU has really helped reiterate her drive to succeed.
“I wasn’t done with college yet,” Molly said. “When I was gone it made me miss college so much and realize how much I wanted to do the field that I’m striving to be in.”
Lauren agreed, after Molly beat cancer, she says that her strength just radiated from her. The whole experience motivated her drive to succeed even more.
Not only has this experience taught Molly so much about herself, but also about the people she surrounds herself with. Through her journey, she learned a lot about her friends. She also learned to appreciate the friendships that have lasted while she was away.
“There has been two different types of friends: there’s the really good friends that reinforce how good of friends they are; or there’s the friends that are kind of flakey and you can socialize with them, but if anything real happens, they're not the ones that can help you,” Molly said.
She even learned it was the same with family.
“The same thing happened with family,” she said. “I found out which family actually wants to actually invest their time and effort into me and which people in my family didn’t feel that way.”
Molly still finds those friends and family members very important to her, but she has learned who is willing to invest their time in her, and whom she should invest her time into.
Having a friend like Molly go through cancer has taught Lauren to really enjoy her time with everyone and to forget about people’s quarks that might be frustrating. What’s important is to remember the best qualities in people and to just have fun.
“I just don’t focus too much on negative things because ultimately life is too short,” Lauren said.
Libby has learned a great deal from this experience, especially to value the time she has with the ones she love.
“Bad things can happen to anybody at any time and cancer really does not discriminate against anybody,” Libby said. “I’ve really started to value my time and my friendships a lot more.”
Molly doesn’t let being a cancer survivor define her as a person, but Lauren said, “She’s the perfect example of a survivor.”
“Molly is the strongest person I’ve ever met,” said Libby in agreement.
As for the future, Molly plans to obtain her Ph.D. in developmental research in psychology after graduating from TCU in May 2015. She wants to focus on how different things affect people’s developmental outcomes, such as parenting or animal-child interactions.
Lauren considers Molly’s passion for knowledge her defining feature, not that she beat cancer.
“Molly is just that lovable know-it-all,” Lauren said. “She genuinely knows everything and she has such a passion about everything she knows.”
Molly also pointed out some differences she will face in the future when she begins to think about dating and marriage. She’s thought a lot about how cancer will affect her relationships because of the personal conversations she’s going to have very early on with her significant other.
“There is never going to be a point where I can become intimate with a man without having the conversation of, ‘What’s that scar on your body?’” Molly said. “It’s going to kind of just unravel the things that you talk about at about a year point or six months point, and it’s going to happen at two months.”
In addition, Molly feels that a lot of people associate their femininity with their sex organs and invest so much of their self-identity in those sex organs, but removing those body parts wasn’t a big deal to her.
She has recognized that the removal of her sex organs will definitely change the way in which she can have children, which doesn’t bother her.
“I more than anything want to have a child, but I can’t have my own child anymore, so it kind of just changes the method of which I’m going to achieve what I still want to do,” she said.
Molly’s last day of chemo was on July 1, 2014, and she has been in remission since.