The lump near her neck popped up out of nowhere.
At first sight of it last March, a few weeks after her junior season with the Emmanuel Christian Academy girls basketball team, Dawnielle Coles ran to her mother, Melissa, in the kitchen.
Coles, now 18, jokingly stuck her arm in the air because that was the only way she could see the lump.
“Look mommy, it’s my twin,” she said, referencing the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
“Dawnielle! You’re supposed to tell me if you have large bumps growing from your body,” Melissa said.
As her mom cried, Dawnielle told her, “Mom, it’s like my twin sister. We’re just going to grow it to full-term and I’ll have it and it will be cool,” just like the movie.
Dawnielle had a feeling it could be serious. Her happy-go-lucky attitude and faith in God helped her get through the diagnosis.
“She loves God,” Melissa said. “She’s just so outspoken and she’s artistic. It’s her personality.”
A few weeks later, the oncologist at Dayton Children’s Hospital,
Dr. Mukund Dole, diagnosed her with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (formerly known as Hodgkin’s disease).
“He’d seen it a dozen times,” Dawnielle said.
Before her biopsy, Dr. Dole told her if she woke up with a port-a-cath, a device used to infuse medication and withdraw blood without repeated needle sticks, in her chest, the lump was cancerous.
She awoke with a port.
The doctors told Coles she would face a very aggressive protocol to beat the cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed, as did the loss of her hair and many awful side effects.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the most curable forms of cancer. As of September, Coles is 100 percent cancer free.
“Everything is getting back to normal,” Coles said. “The hair is growing pretty nice.”
She said without God and her church, the Vineyard in Northridge, she never would have survived. “God is the only reason I made it through this.”
Road to recovery
For Coles, it wasn’t until months after the diagnosis that she realized she had cancer.
“It didn’t hit me that I had cancer or that I was bald until I put the pictures on Facebook,” Dawnielle said. “I was like, 'Dang, I was bald. I had cancer’. That’s when it really hit me.”
Her happy-go-lucky attitude helped keep her spirit up.
“I’ve always made big jokes out of cancer,” Dawnielle said. “I went to a summer camp and I still had my wig. All the girls had to get lice checks. So I sat down at the lice check stand with this cute, older lady and I took my wig off. She just froze.”
“It was weird,” Melissa said of the diagnosis and the treatments of four 21-day cycles that started in April. “At first it was strange and all new. You were all caught up in the newness of everything.”
The first day of chemotherapy treatments lasted nearly 12 hours, but she still wanted to go to church at the Vineyard in Northridge. When she arrived, several of her friends in the youth group carried her into the building.
“Even though she was pretty upbeat, when she would get down, there was some person or some thing that would come along to help keep her encouraged,” Melissa said.
By the time the second cycle came around, the side effects began to kick in. She would suffer from severe headaches and intense pain in her jaw. She also had thrush, a common side effect of chemotherapy. At one point, Melissa said, she was receiving as many as three pain medications at once. Often times, she wouldn’t be able to walk for weeks at a time.
“I don’t remember much,” Dawnielle said. “I learned a lot about who my friends are, and who I actually am.”
“That child suffered more than any person I’ve ever seen suffer,” Melissa said. “She would just cry and cry, and many times she’d be in the hospital for days.”
Halfway through the treatments, when she was bald and black-eyed, Dawnielle told her mom not to worry.
“Mom, I’m going to live,” Dawnielle said. “I can do this.”
After the chemotherapy, she began radiation treatments every day in Cincinnati in August. She went through a new method of radiation that restricts exposure to tissue throughout her body.
Four months later, she’s cancer free.
Melissa said they received loads of support from many friends across the area, especially the Vineyard.
“It’s unbelievable the amount of support they’ve given us,” Melissa said. “To me, that’s how you show love in a tangible way. They loved us, definitely.”
For Melissa, the situation helped bring their relationship full circle. She adopted her at the age of four when she married Dawnielle’s father, Noel.
At first, there was some animosity between them, but they’d learned to get along over the years.
Countless nights spent holding Dawnielle while she was shivering and crying in the hospital because she in so much pain brought them closer together.
“For me, the greatest thing to happen out of this cancer is that Dawnielle and I just fell in love,” Melissa said. “It’s gotten us to the point where we’re just so close.”
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