A 21-year-old athlete who was diagnosed with cancer has opened up about the symptoms that caused alarm bells.
Hope Reynolds was supposed to be diving into her senior year as a competitive swimmer at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
But instead of soaking up those final college memories, she was sidelined by intense migraines and constant nausea.
“I was not able to eat anything,” Reynolds, now 25, told PEOPLE.
It started with a routine doctor visit for her migraines, but during that appointment, she casually mentioned finding a lump in her right breast.
“The doctor was not really concerned,” Reynolds recalls, though a mammogram was ordered just to be safe.
When she tried to schedule it, she was told the facility didn’t perform mammograms on people her age. Instead, she went in for an ultrasound — and that’s when everything changed.
“I distinctly remember the provider came in and said, ‘We see something. The odds of it being cancerous are so low because of your age, but let's just do a biopsy just in case,’” Reynolds remembers. “Again, I was reassured that it probably wasn't anything serious.”
But on September 14, 2020 — just two days after the biopsy — her phone started blowing up during a grad school interview.
"The nurse was leaving voicemails saying, ‘Please call me back.’ I kind of knew that it wasn't good," she says.
The diagnosis was stage 3B invasive ductal carcinoma at the age of 21.
"It's just a whirlwind, trying to figure out, 'Okay, am I going to get treatment in Michigan? Am I going to go home to Pennsylvania for treatment? Am I going to have to put undergrad on hold? Am I going to have to put PT school on hold?' Things moved really fast, but it felt really slow. I felt like every hour was just crawling by," she says.
Within 48 hours, she was back home in Pennsylvania to begin treatment. That fall, Reynolds underwent eight grueling rounds of chemotherapy.
In February 2021, she had a bilateral mastectomy, followed by 25 rounds of radiation through March and April.
Still, her swim team didn’t let her journey go unnoticed. They rallied around her with bracelets that read #BelieveinHope and featured the Bible verse Hebrews 6:19 — “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul.”
"I was so excited that I got to swim in my last ever college swim meet a few weeks after my surgery, but before I started radiation, because they said once I started radiation, I wasn't allowed to get in the water because it can really damage your skin," she says.
Just a few weeks after radiation wrapped, she returned to school to finish her senior year in person.
By July 2021, she underwent her final surgery — a reconstruction that replaced her expanders with implants.
The very next month, she moved to Durham, North Carolina, to pursue her dream of becoming a physical therapist at Duke University. She also transferred her cancer care to Duke Health.
Now that she’s in remission, she’s starting to take control of her life again.
"After that, a lot of the decisions fell more towards me on my own. All of a sudden I had this new thing that I had to think about: 'What does life actually look like now?' I was so focused on just getting through it. I never thought about, 'Okay, now what about after cancer?' That was really difficult. I'm still figuring it out day-by-day."
She’s now living her dream — working as a physical therapist in acute care at Duke Health.
"Just because I'm a cancer survivor doesn't mean that I can't do what everyone else can do," she says. "Yes, I had cancer, but you can go back to living your life in so many amazing ways afterwards."