by Jana Cranmer
December 3, 2007

Above: Alumna Cynthia Colello stays at Hoag Hospital during her second successful fight with leukemia. Below: President Bob Brower presents Colello with her diploma last December in her hospital room in Newport Beach. Photo courtesy Cynthia Colello

At 23, PLNU alumna Cynthia Colello has defied the expectations of many doctors. The fact that she is still alive is “nothing short of a miracle” to her friends and family, she said.

Colello has survived cancer—not once, but twice—in the last two years and has been a model of strength and faith to her friends and family.

“It has shaped her as a person in ways that many of us will never experience,” said Colello’s best friend, Mandy Richardson. “She has seen what it is like to come really close to death, and it has made her more of a woman of God and more dependent on his will.”

Colello’s most recent bout with cancer began when she was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia the week after Thanksgiving last year, abruptly ending her college career at PLNU and setting her on what she called an “up-down-up” emotional and physical rollercoaster.

Colello said her family and friends “practically never left her side” throughout the year. Despite the pain of seeing her suffer and not knowing the future, they comforted and came beside her in her fight: her mother a “steady rock,” her father “the teddy bear who rides the emotional rollercoaster with [her]” and her younger brother, “who is emotional, but practical,” along with a host of close, faithful friends.

At one point in January, Colello contracted a lung infection, and an oncologist told her that treating the infection would make her ineligible for a stem cell transplant, her only hope for survival.

“They told me that I needed to start thinking about how I wanted to spend the rest of my time, which was between two weeks and three months,” Colello said. “For a full 48 hours, myself, my family and my best friend all thought that I was dead.”
Rather than crumbling under the weight of disappointment, fear and self-pity, Colello drew upon her inner reserves of strength and trusted God with her life.
“It has been an honor to be her best friend, watch her go through it and see her joy through it all,” Richardson said. “Cynthia is very strong, full of life and a load of energy. She is all of that; she is just an amazing person.”

Richardson said that Colello’s strength and unfailing trust in God were contagious.

“The fact that she wasn’t down in the dumps and blaming God for it but rejoicing and going, ‘OK, God, whatever you’re doing, I’m going to do it, too,’ made me trust God, too,” Richardson said.

Colello’s lung healed itself, and in April, she received the transplant from a “perfect match” donor at City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. Recovery has been a “huge uphill battle that will take a full year to be over, best case scenario” according to Colello, who has experienced intermittent nausea, fatigue and sheer exhaustion since the transplant. 

“I am in awe of the way our God has blessed my family,” her father wrote in an e-mail to Colello’s friends and family. “Things are going so well with Cynthia’s recovery that I catch myself almost taking her health for granted. After so many months of being concerned not just for her health, but for her life, this is another new thing for me.”

PLNU supported Colello in various ways throughout the year. Her friends and former professors supported her through hospital visits and e-mails, and Tim Hall frequently e-mailed her father to keep the school informed of her progress.
President Brower and Joe Watkins, vice president of External Relations, came to her hospital room at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach to present Colello with her diploma last December. In addition, more than 500 people in the PLNU community participated in an on-campus bone marrow donor drive held in her honor at the end of January. Donors were added to the national registry at no charge.

Communication and Theatre Department Chair Paul Bassett, one of Colello’s favorite professors, sent her a video of the one-act she directed last fall and included personal messages of encouragement from her friends and classmates.

“She was very enthusiastic in classes, always trying to learn,” Bassett said.

“Cynthia’s got a lot of courage, but she has kept her chin up. We sent the video up there when she was going through a lot.”

One of Colello’s one-acts, “The Waiting Room,” will be performed in Salomon Theatre this weekend as part of the series of one-acts. The one-act, a comedy focused on the interaction between two men in a hospital waiting room, is “a little bit ironic because I wrote it after I’d had cancer once,” Colello said. “I was reflecting back on what I’d never have to go through again.”

Colello said she “got to relearn” many of the lessons she learned the first time she had cancer, particularly that God is in control “no matter how much you think you are” and to take things one week at a time rather than a day at a time because “you’ll feel like you’re actually going somewhere.”

Colello is still recovering from the transplant, anxious for the day her body fully adjusts to the new cells. But in the meantime, she is preparing to teach high school English and theater and pursuing her teaching credential at Cal State Fullerton.

“Cynthia is doing fantastic,” Richardson said. “She is really pushing through, going to school now and making plans to continue life. She is not letting it [her illness] be a hindrance; she looks at it as a steppingstone, something she had to go through but made her stronger.”

“The Waiting Room” one-act will show in Salomon Theatre on Wednesday, Dec. 5 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, Dec. 8 at 2 p.m.