04/23/2026
Alicia was not feeling any symptoms when she went in for a routine blood test, ordered because of a medication she was taking at the time.
“My dermatologist called me and said you need to go to the ER,” she recalls. “I was living in Ohio at the time. I checked myself into the ER and they said, ‘we think you have cancer but we’re not hematologists, so we can’t confirm it.’”
She drove back to New York for the weekend, to help with fair preparations at her family farm in Corfu, then went to see a hematologist the following Monday. “I saw this doctor and he said you have to go to the hospital this very minute. I said, ‘I can’t do that. I have work to do. I have corn to sell. I have to go scout fields. The county fair is coming.’ He said ‘No, you have to go right now.’”
Alica was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. In addition to having to spend a month at Roswell Park, she was told she couldn’t recover on her family’s farm, which she was told was “the worst thing you can do if you have a severely compromised immune system” because of the animal dander and waste. Alicia’s nurses also told her during her last round of chemotherapy that she would not be able to raise pigs anymore, something she had done since childhood.
“I laid in the bed in 5 West, on the right side of the wing, sobbing,” Alicia says.
After enduring the physical and emotional challenges of a young adult cancer diagnosis, Alicia has returned to her family farm, where she’s once again raising pigs and embracing a new chapter as a mother. In a heartfelt gesture of gratitude, she brings her Roswell Park physician, Dr. Wang, a turkey each year for Thanksgiving.
Alicia admits she lives with a fear— not that her cancer will return, but that she might not fulfill her second chance at life. “I wonder if this is enough, and why I got this second chance and not someone else,” she says. “I don't think about my own body and cancer, but I do think about my life and if I look back, will it be enough? It has to be enough for only me, but for some reason, getting a second chance, thanks to modern medicine, I'm like, there's something I have to fulfill. That's why I'm here.”
“All the dreams I had when I was sick are now coming true,” Alicia says. “There’s beauty in the really hard journey.”
Spread some strength this Young Adult Cancer Awareness Month—drop a 💚 or a message for Alicia.
