When I first heard the words “you have cancer,” I remember thinking I was too young. It was 2014, and I’d just turned 34 and completed my doctorate of social sciences at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., ready to launch into a career in international child protection. Life had other plans. After a year of feeling unwell and finding lumps in my groin, neck and armpits—but being told by my health care providers that I was “young, healthy and fine”—I was diagnosed with stage-three follicular lymphoma, a type of cancer often found in the lymph nodes. It’s also generally found in people over 60.

Overnight, I became what’s known in the medical system as an “AYA,” an acronym that stands for an adolescent or younger adult between the ages of 15 and 39 with cancer. Because most cancers are diagnosed later in life, I often found myself sitting in chemotherapy rooms with patients who could have easily been my grandparents. My emerging career, which I had worked so hard to build, was put on hold. While my friends travelled to exotic places, got engaged and had children, I attended medical appointments, chemo and immunotherapy, worrying whether I’d be able to—or even live to—have kids of my own. When I asked how treatment might affect my ability to have children, there was no clear answer. And when I looked for stats and survival rates for follicular lymphoma, there were few details specific to people my age.

Once I finished treatment in 2016, I decided to apply my research skills to improve cancer care for AYAs across Canada, so it better reflected their unique needs and life stages. The result was Anew, an AYA-focused research collaborative at Royal Roads University, which I founded in 2022. That same year, the science journal Nature confirmed that we’re facing an epidemic of........

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