Erin Elliott sipped her tea at Cafe Kubal on a cloudy Friday morning. The shop was crowded, so she had to talk over customers to discuss plans for her upcoming 20th birthday brunch with her friend John Fisher.

A year ago, this would have been impossible for Elliott. As she started her second semester at Syracuse University in January 2017, her voice couldn’t reach volumes louder than a whisper. Her vocal chords were recovering from damage they’d sustained during a thyroid cancer removal surgery.

“It’s really weird to come back to school now and think about where I was a year ago,” she said.

Elliott, now a sophomore, is in remission and working with student groups to promote awareness for pediatric cancer. Hill Communications has partnered with the Public Relations Student Society of America at SU for this year’s Bateman Competition to create a public relations campaign for With Purpose, a national advocacy group focused on pediatric cancer. The groups and Elliott hope the campaign will educate the SU community about cancer and make it less scary for people to talk about.

Fisher, a sophomore public relations major in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, is an account associate for Hill Communications, SU’s student-run PR firm. Every year, PRSSA takes on a client and builds that client a public relations campaign from scratch, he said, and people from Hill Communications work on PRSSA’s team.

The information Fisher has learned while working on this campaign has shocked him — like the fact that only four new treatments for childhood cancer have been FDA approved in the last 30 years, and one in five kids diagnosed with cancer will not survive, according to With Purpose’s website.

“That’s the shock that I think they want, to get people involved,” he said.

Realizing how prevalent the disease is changed his perspective as well.

“It could be me, it could be one of my friends. … It was one of my friends,” he said, gesturing across the table to Elliott.

Fisher and Elliott became friends through First Year Players, a student performer group.

Since she started college, Elliott has been dealing with cancer and its effects. During a routine physical before she came to SU to pursue a degree in public relations, Elliott’s general practitioner checked her thyroid gland and found a nodule. The day before she flew to the East Coast to start school, she had her first biopsy, and then another one the day after she came home for winter break in December 2016.

Just after Christmas that year, Elliott, who was 18 at the time, was relaxing at home when her family got the call. On a scale of one to five with five being the most potentially cancerous, the nodule on her neck was a five. She had no family history of cancer.

 

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In early January, Elliott left her home in Fresno, California, and traveled to Florida to have her thyroid surgically removed. The cancer was too advanced to wait any longer for treatment.

With classes starting just weeks after the surgery, Elliott’s mother, Dawn, said the idea of not sending Elliott back to SU didn’t cross their minds.

“It never occurred to us not to send her back,” Dawn said. “We figured she has friends there, (Upstate Medical University) is there. Looking back on it, it was kind of strange to send her on a plane with no thyroid.”

Dawn described their philosophy as: “One day at a time, don’t make drama out of this, we’ll just take this as it comes.”

Elliott had reasons to be stressed when she returned to school. The surgery had damaged her vocal chords and left her with a voice that she described as high and wispy — “a mix between a Muppet and an 80-year-old smoker.”

She wanted to continue her life as it was, but that was hard. The stress of not knowing the extent to which she’d be able to speak or sing again took an emotional toll on her, she said.

Elliott found broaching the subject with professors to be hard. She said this makes the work that Hill Communications and PRSSA are doing for With Purpose essential.

“It’s really important that this is happening, and I am ecstatic that With Purpose was chosen for the Bateman Competition,” Elliott said. “I think that ‘cancer’ is such a word we’re afraid of, and we’re afraid to talk about it.”

The Bateman Competition takes place on college campuses across the United States. Fisher said having college students work with these organizations helps spread their information more effectively.

“College campuses can kind of be an enigma for certain organizations, especially if they don’t have students on campus working with them,” Fisher said. “There’s something that even a 20-year-old in college can do to help.”

He said building a brand on social media — something he used to see as trivial — makes a big difference in creating awareness for groups like With Purpose.

Elliott will spend the rest of this semester continuing the recovery process. She’s transitioned to taking a thyroid hormone and takes several pills a day now, in addition to attending routine screenings to check her progress. This summer, she’ll have another screening, and if it goes well, she’ll be considered cancer-free.

In the meantime, she’s been able to resume voice lessons. Elliott will get to use her voice plenty on the FYP executive board, as president of Game Club and while working with SU’s chapter of Camp Kesem, an organization that operates summer camps for children with a parent affected by cancer. She’ll continue working with Fisher and the Bateman team to help spread the word about With Purpose this semester as well.

Fisher said there will be on-campus fundraising events at SU for With Purpose and encouraged students look out for those.

Said Fisher: “Having someone here that experienced it makes telling this story that much more effective. This is what happened to (Erin), this is what’s happening to children across the country, this is what we can do.”

Published on February 26, 2018 at 10:41 pm

Contact Colleen: [email protected] | @ColleenEFergus2