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Melissa Gasmen ’18
Cancer diagnosis doesn’t stop her
S
he never spilled a tear when she got the news, when the
tests came back and the doctor sat her down and the future
became a murky landscape of ifs and maybes and the great
unknowable.
The tears would come later. And they would be an affirmation
of sorts.
The tears would come after Melissa Gasmen ’18, a cheerful young
woman from Orlando, Fla., had gotten the news that she had stage
3-C uterine cancer, back in June 2014. She had just completed her
first year in the Pharmacy Program at Manchester University. She
loved her life. She loved the school. She loved the friends she had
made there – friends with whom she had been that night at the
winery when she started throwing up and couldn’t stop, the night
that led to the doctor and the tests and the unknowable.
She was 28 years old, and she had cancer. Which meant she would
have to leave school.
And that’s when the tears came.
She broke down, finally, in the office of Joe Bonnarens, the
associate dean for student affairs. And that as much as anything
revealed how much MU had come to mean to her, how close to
her heart it had come to reside.
“I didn’t cry when the doctor told me what I was gonna go
through and what I was about to face,” says Gasmen, now a P2
who’s been cancer-free for almost a year. “I broke down in front
of Dr. Bonnarens because I did not want to leave school.
“I’d finally found my calling, and I was loving it here. I’d busted my
butt to get into pharmacy school, and then this happened.”
The daughter of a critical care nurse, Gasmen chose pharmacy
over nursing after graduating from Florida State with a degree in
environmental science. Although she wasn’t really considering Indiana
as somewhere she might land, Manchester was on the list of schools
that fit her criteria. And so an email exchange with Greg Hetrick,
director of student affairs, ensued, and that in turn led to a visit.
“That’s when I pretty much started falling in love with the school,”
Gasmen says. “The facility, the people ... I’ve never really seen a place
that was so professional and yet had a personal touch. I really liked
how I wasn’t a number.”
Even after she packed up and headed home to Orlando for treatment,
Gasmen discovered her absence was only physical. A thousand
miles removed from the campus in Fort Wayne, she was out of sight
but never out of mind. Emails arrived regularly from the staff and
her fellow students. Care packages, too. They even dressed up as
Superman, knowing that was Gasmen’s superhero of choice.
“The whole school did the Superman thing,” she says.
“I was shocked.”
It was also more confirmation that the unique MU mission that
attracted her to begin with – a commitment to the well-being and
infinite worth of the individual – was a real and living thing.
“You know, for me, it (didn’t) hit me that I really, really do love this
school until I was diagnosed with cancer,” she says. “The amount of
support I got from the school ... I felt like I was part of a family. That
I belonged.”
By Benjamin Smith
VIDEO
See the video at
magazine.manchester.edu
Manchester | 17