“I was at a point in my life where I was talking to my pastor about what Heaven was going to be like and I kind of just accepted that.” -Taylor
Taylor's Story
Unfortunately, this isn’t Taylor’s first battle with cancer. At the age of just 14, Taylor was experiencing unpleasant abdominal pain that was thought to be a mere virus. To rid the virus, her doctor stuck her on a clean diet to see if it would help, however nothing changed and she knew in her gut something was seriously wrong.
After returning to the hospital, doctors decided to run some scans to see if there was a more serious issue at hand. This eventually led to a colonoscopy, something abnormal for a 14-year-old to endure.
“They finally did a colonoscopy and they couldn’t get through because it was just completely blocked off,” Taylor said. “They went in and they took out part of my colon and they found stage 3 colon cancer. It's called Signet Ring Cell Adenocarcinoma, and that just changed my life.”
Friends and family were shocked at the diagnosis.
Taylor’s father, Bob Helland, found that he and his wife went through different stages after learning about their daughter’s diagnosis.
“At first I’m sure we thought there had to be a mistake, this can’t be correct, you know they messed something up or something,” Bob said, "and then we realized that it wasn’t a mistake and we were just devastated, just completely devastated.”
Taylor’s mother, Julia Helland, could not believe the news. She felt sick and as if the room were closing in on her.
“I looked for the trashcan because I thought I was going to throw up,” Julia said.
Taylor’s oldest friend, Sierra Ann Hendry, remembered her mother informing her of the bad news after school in eighth grade.
“I didn’t know the severity of it," Sierra said. "I was just, ‘Okay, well what do we do about it?’ And my mom told me she might lose her hair, and then that kind of hit me, cause I was like, ‘Oh gosh, this really is serious.’ I was just devastated, I was confused, like, ‘Why is it her? Why did it happen to her?’”
Taylor had also been dating her boyfriend, Chris Messer, for only a couple weeks at the time of her diagnosis.
“Initial reaction was kind of like ‘What?’” Chris said. “Just general shock, I didn’t really know what to do or how to react.”
Chris said leaving Taylor’s side was never crossed his mind.
“It’s kind of weird when people ask me, ‘Why did you stick around?’” Chris said. “To me, it wasn’t a big change, it didn’t really cross my mind to leave.”
Even Taylor found that it wasn’t like any 16-year-old boy to stick around after such devastating news, especially in such a fresh relationship.
“If I was a 16-year-old boy and my girlfriend of a week said she had cancer, I’d be like, ‘Bye, I can’t handle this in my life. I don’t need that stress.’” Taylor laughed. “But he’s like rock solid.”
The support she had from friends, family, doctors and her sorority made treatment more bearable.
Taylor had 12 rounds of chemo, followed by HIPEC surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“It’s a really major surgery,” Taylor said. “There’s a nine-inch scar on my stomach where they put heated chemo in and just mixed it all up so it gets every little crack and corner.”
Post chemo and HIPEC, Taylor was declared to be in remission… but not for long.
After seven months, she started feeling pain in her abdomen, again. Taylor and her parents went back to the doctors and found two tumors in her abdomen that “developed out of nowhere.” Just three months prior, Taylor had clear scans, meaning that the tumors had grown into the size of softballs in less than three months.
“At first I’m sure we thought there had to be a mistake, this can’t be correct, you know they messed something up or something,” Bob said, "and then we realized that it wasn’t a mistake and we were just devastated, just completely devastated.”
Taylor’s mother, Julia Helland, could not believe the news. She felt sick and as if the room were closing in on her.
“I looked for the trashcan because I thought I was going to throw up,” Julia said.
Taylor’s oldest friend, Sierra Ann Hendry, remembered her mother informing her of the bad news after school in eighth grade.
“I didn’t know the severity of it," Sierra said. "I was just, ‘Okay, well what do we do about it?’ And my mom told me she might lose her hair, and then that kind of hit me, cause I was like, ‘Oh gosh, this really is serious.’ I was just devastated, I was confused, like, ‘Why is it her? Why did it happen to her?’”
Taylor had also been dating her boyfriend, Chris Messer, for only a couple weeks at the time of her diagnosis.
“Initial reaction was kind of like ‘What?’” Chris said. “Just general shock, I didn’t really know what to do or how to react.”
Chris said leaving Taylor’s side was never crossed his mind.
“It’s kind of weird when people ask me, ‘Why did you stick around?’” Chris said. “To me, it wasn’t a big change, it didn’t really cross my mind to leave.”
Even Taylor found that it wasn’t like any 16-year-old boy to stick around after such devastating news, especially in such a fresh relationship.
“If I was a 16-year-old boy and my girlfriend of a week said she had cancer, I’d be like, ‘Bye, I can’t handle this in my life. I don’t need that stress.’” Taylor laughed. “But he’s like rock solid.”
The support she had from friends, family, doctors and her sorority made treatment more bearable.
Taylor had 12 rounds of chemo, followed by HIPEC surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“It’s a really major surgery,” Taylor said. “There’s a nine-inch scar on my stomach where they put heated chemo in and just mixed it all up so it gets every little crack and corner.”
Post chemo and HIPEC, Taylor was declared to be in remission… but not for long.
After seven months, she started feeling pain in her abdomen, again. Taylor and her parents went back to the doctors and found two tumors in her abdomen that “developed out of nowhere.” Just three months prior, Taylor had clear scans, meaning that the tumors had grown into the size of softballs in less than three months.
Because the tumors were growing so quickly and aggressively, her doctors were telling her that the chances of her being cured were “virtually zero.”
“The second one was the worst, because she had had a clear scan,” Bob said. “And so we were, you know, kind of asking one of the doctors that night that was on call, so I asked her, ‘Is my daughter going to die?’ and she said, ‘Unfortunately, that’s probably what’s going to happen.’”
Taylor began to accept her diagnosis and that this disease would eventually kill her.
“I was at a point in my life where I was talking to my pastor about what Heaven was going to be like and I kind of just accepted that,” Taylor said.
The second diagnosis was just as difficult for Sierra and Chris, both thought she was finally done with cancer, but just as Taylor did, they learned to accept it.
“I was more mad then,” Sierra said. “But then I just kind of accepted it, maybe she’ll do it again like she did the first time. She’ll beat it again.”
“The second time it came back was when it really hit me hard, like, ‘Oh my God this is real, she can die,’” Chris said. “It was really scary.”
However, this wasn’t the end of the fight for Taylor, her parents, or her friends. She began chemotherapy treatments for the second time. In turn, the tumors shrank enough to where her doctors could go in and remove them surgically.
This was her second HIPEC surgery, going in with the same nine-inch incision on her abdomen. Once the doctors opened her up, there was some good news; the tumors were contained in both her ovaries, so all the doctors had to do was remove them.
“That was a blessing because we didn’t know if it was going to spread all over my stomach and stuff,” Taylor said. “So that was really crazy. Miracle from God, definitely.”
Post surgery and chemotherapy, Taylor was in remission for 16 months, which included her entire senior year of high school.
That following August, the same month she was set to start classes at TCU, Taylor went in for her routine scans to make sure everything was okay and functioning normally. She felt great and showed no abnormal symptoms that would make her think anything was wrong.
Turned out, something was wrong. One of her lymph nodes lit up in the scan. Doctors performed a follow-up scan and figured out that there was a tumor by her kidney and ureter blocking her kidney causing it to fill up with fluid.
Unable to drain Taylor’s kidney, doctors went in and took out about 80 percent of the tumor and added a stint to help drain her kidney. Leaving about 20 percent of the malignant tumor in her abdomen, Taylor began chemotherapy treatments for the third time.
She was less sad this time around, more frustrated due to the timing. This latest diagnosis came just weeks before she was set to begin her freshman year of college as a Horned Frog.
“It was really frustrating because I was about to go to college,” Taylor said. “I’m so close and they’re like, ‘You gotta do it again.’”
According to Bob, they were all worn down at that point, but they were much more hopeful than the second time. They had caught the mass early, giving Taylor a better chance at survival.
“It was kind of just, ‘Oh not again, not again.’” Bob said. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen, but again we try not to worry too much about the future, but the third time, it was more, ‘Poor Taylor, she’s gotta go through this again,’ and she’s having such a great year at TCU and so happy with everything around here that it was just terrible timing. But there’s not really a great time to get diagnosed with cancer.”
Both Sierra and Chris were upset again, but Sierra felt as though she was already used to it.
“I kind of expected it because they kind of told me not to get my hopes up,” she said. “I was still really mad, but I wasn’t as mad.”
In addition, Taylor had to cancel a trip she had planned to Los Angeles and was facing a possible absence from sorority recruitment, which she was determined not to miss. Recruitment was set a week before the start of classes.
“I was not going to miss it,” Taylor said. “I just did everything they told me to and ate as much as I could and walked as much as I could, because I had to get out of there.”
Her third journey required her to be in the hospital from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon, constantly being pumped with chemotherapy drugs for 46 hours, every other weekend.
“It’s a lot of work to go to chemo every other weekend,” Taylor said. “All the driving to the hospital, all the going to get food and being there is really tiring.”
For Taylor, the most difficult part of having cancer and going though chemotherapy in college is missing out on different experiences.
“I have to miss every other Friday, which has been hard, and you know, Saturday is football game day or mixers for my sorority,” Taylor said. “It stinks missing out on stuff, but all my sisters and friends come and visit me.
However, Taylor’s chemotherapy treatments end up being a social event when she’s at Cook Children’s. With many friends and family constantly visiting her, distracting her from the long treatments.
“My favorite part is we get these puzzles to do and we do a different puzzle every week,” Taylor said. “It’s just fun having everyone come sit together and talk and just do this puzzle, and it’s like there’s no distractions, no social media, just people talking and having a good time. It really distracts from the chemo and makes the weekend go by faster.”
To date, Chris has never missed a round of her treatments or surgeries.
“I try to go up there every day on the rounds and they’re every other week, so it’s not like they’re super difficult to make them,” Chris said. “But I don’t think I’ve actually missed a round yet.”
She also receives visits from Sierra, who tries to make it up to the hospital as much as possible.
“I try to go up there while she’s there, but if I can’t, I’ll try and make up for it by going the whole weekend and stay up there for a while,” Sierra said.
Mostly, Taylor longs for those regular weekends where she can catch up on sleep or classwork like any other healthy person in college.
“I think just missing things is the hardest part, because I really don’t get sick,” Taylor said. “It’s not terrible, but just the fact that I have to be [at the hospital].”
Taylor rarely feels ill during treatments and spends her time every other weekend just waiting to be done. When she leaves the hospital on Sunday afternoons, her parents drop her off at her dorm, where she goes and showers immediately. Finally out of the hospital room, Taylor can relax.
Monday mornings after chemotherapy, Taylor wakes up feeling sore. The soreness lasts a few days, but once she gets past those days of sensitivity, she goes on with her normal day-to-day life…until she begins the next round of treatment.
In her free time, outside of chemotherapy and classes, Taylor likes to hang out with her friends, whether it is in her small group ministry, K Life, attending bible study within her sorority, or hanging out with old and new friends.
“I think it’s really cool making all these new friends and just having this whole new level of support that I’ve never had,” Taylor said.
When in comes to sharing her story, Taylor isn’t shy at all. The friends she grew up with and went to high school with have known her for her battle. Those who are just meeting her at TCU are shocked when Taylor tells them about her diagnosis.
“It’s really helped me be more confidant and an outgoing person, and so it’s definitely been a lot easier to make friends,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s roommate, Katie Brooks, found out about Taylor’s battle long before they ever met. One of their mutual friends had mentioned one of her friends battling cancer.
“I just knew my friend Shelby had a friend who had cancer, and I was like, ‘Wow, that is so sad for someone to be so young and to have this, especially with college in front of them, which is already the hardest transitional times of your life,’” Katie said.
It wasn’t until Katie and Taylor matched a roommate finder website that she put two and two together.
“We met on this website called RoomSurf that does a personality match and we were the only 100 percent match and so I was like, ‘Oh I gotta meet this girl,’” Katie said. “So I looked her up on Facebook and I saw that we already had a mutual friend, so I texted that friend, Shelby, and was like, ‘Hey, do you know this girl?’ And they were together at the time, and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, yeah that would be perfect. I have to introduce y'all!’”
According to her friends and family, Taylor’s journey has taught them all to look at life differently.
“Life is short,” Sierra said. “I shouldn’t take anything for granted.”
“The power of attitude can completely change the way you deal with things,” Katie said.
For Chris, it taught him patience.
“It’s kind of taught me like, look up when you’re walking,” he said. “Don’t be hung up on what’s going on now. Look forward. Enjoy things around you, which you have now. Be excited for what could be in the future.”
Taylor’s mom finds that they’ve had some of the best times in the last three and a half years. They’ve seen things and been to things, and met people who have changed their lives.
“It really does go from the best to the absolute worst,” Julia said. “I think that’s just how a pendulum swings. If it goes way out one way, it’s gonna swing back the other way and that’s really how it’s been for us and we’re very blessed and lucky and hopeful.”