Battling Cancer

In February of 2024, life was normal for Lily Dunlap. That is, it was normal for an exceptionally driven, A-student, basketball playing 16-year-old at St. John’s School. In her own words, Lily was “the oldest daughter, the oldest grandchild, all of the things.”

Still, Lily’s life wasn’t perfect – she had faced more than her share of challenges for a teenager. When she was 4, she was diagnosed with hearing loss that she’d had since birth. With hearing aids and the ability to lip-read, Lily doesn’t think much about her hearing. “It’s just a part of me,” she says. Then in 2018, her mom Colleen Dunlap was diagnosed with breast cancer. Colleen, her husband Mike, and their children Lily, Allison (now 15), and Joshua (now 12) relied on their strong faith and each other as Colleen healed. But nothing could have prepared Lily – or her family – for the diagnosis Lily received in the spring of her sophomore year of high school.

“Lily had had a couple of typical illnesses, strep, a sinus infection, a virus. But they were back-to-back,” Colleen says. “It was very unusual for her. One weekend I took her to urgent care, and they flagged a large lymph node in her neck. 

“A month later, it was noted again. Then, on spring break 2024, she was feeling terrible. We went straight to the pediatrician, and he said he wanted us to give things another month so that we could get Lily healthy and see if it was a reactive lymph node that would go away.” That was March 18.

“A month went by, and he ordered imaging. On April 22, we went for ultrasounds, and within an hour, I had a very, very, very concerning radiology report. Not only did Lily have the one very large lymph node, but there were multiple abnormal lymph nodes.”

SUPPORT SYSTEM Years before her daughter Lily was diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma, Colleen Dunlap had survived breast cancer. That experience helped Colleen support her daughter. (Photo: Caroline Blocker Martinez)

Immediate biopsies showed something seriously wrong. A few days later, an ear, nose, and throat specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital told the family: This is probably cancer of some kind. 

In the meantime, there was a basketball tournament in Dallas. “We were hemming and hawing about whether to go to that tournament,” Colleen says. “But the doctor said we could go if Lily was up to it, and we went to keep our routine, our normalcy. Otherwise we’d be sitting around all weekend stressing about the biopsies.”

On May 15, Lily was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin Lymphoma. Ten days after the Dallas tournament, she had surgery and started chemo.

“When I was finally diagnosed,” Lily says, “I thought I had prepared myself. But there’s no way you can prepare yourself for the news you have cancer. You’re never ready for that.”

For the following few days, Lily says she closed down. “It was pretty crazy,” she says. “I was pretty shook.”

“Initially, we were hysterical,” Colleen says. “You go through the stages of shock and grief. My husband and I were thinking How much more do we as a family need to go through? But the pity party didn’t last very long. We put our heads down and went through.” Again, the Dunlaps relied on their faith and the people surrounding them for support. 

“If you look at it all, it feels overwhelming,” Colleen says. “We had to focus on that day, that week, one step at a time. If we thought about the big picture, the what-ifs, it was too much.”

COURAGEOUS Coach Kathy Halligan recognized Lily’s determination and resilience and nominated her for the national Naismith Courage Award. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

Thankfully, the doctors told Lily – and her parents – that her prognosis was good. “They said it was going to be really hard for a year, it would be a significant blip, but she was going to live to tell her grandchildren about it.’”

The “really hard” part, according to the doctors, would include dropping out of school and church and anything with a crowd for a year.

“I remember sitting there, the oncologist saying Lily was going to have to take a year off. It was like a bomb had gone off in the room. She said the risk of infection was too high, a simple cold would put her in the hospital and lead to transfusions. But within three seconds, Lily just said That’s not gonna work. She wanted to graduate on time, with her friends.” Sitting out was out of the question.

The doctors were not convinced. “They didn’t want to commit to anything, so we decided to revisit the subject after the summer, closer to the start of school,” Colleen says. 

“Then it all moved very quickly,” Lily says. “It’s not just you have cancer, it’s we’re doing chemo next week, and here we go.” Lily says nothing really sank in until the first chemo treatment. “I started figuring out what I was going to look like,” she says of the thought of losing her hair.

On May 24, Lily – and her family – dove into a routine of 12 rounds of chemotherapy given every two weeks. Things got harder as the cumulative nature of the chemo took effect.

The Dunlaps – Colleen, Mike, Joshua, Lily, and Allison – on the day Lily won the award. (Photo: Jack Chavez)

While she was going through a summer of chemotherapy, Lily, her family, and her doctors developed a relationship. “They could see how very important [going to school] was to Lily,” Colleen says. “They also knew that we as a family would take this seriously, too. We told them she would wear a mask every day at school, and if she needed to sit in another spot in the room, we’d do that, too.”

In August, Lily’s hair began to fall out. “It’s another one of those situations,” she says. “You can say you’re going to lose your hair, but you don’t realize how much your hair is part of your identity until you lose it.” Doctors didn’t allow her to shave her head for fear that nicks might cause too much blood loss. “A lot of little things come with cancer that you don’t think about,” Lily says. So she cut her hair short. “It helped so I didn’t have to see long strands coming out,” she says. “There would be hair covering my pillow every morning, on my carpet. My hands would be covered with it in the shower. It was never-ending, always a reminder of cancer.

“I got a wig. I hated my wig. It didn’t feel like me. But neither did being bald. It was a conundrum.” Lily decided to wear the wig to school.

With the doctors’ okay, Lily began her junior year at St. John’s with an adapted schedule. She would miss three of every 10 days at school because of treatment and recovery from the treatment. So she took four classes at St. John’s (a normal schedule would be six or seven) and two online classes through Texas Tech. 

“It was tricky, because I don’t like online classes, and it was tricky because of chemo,” Lily says. “And it was always like a catch-up game. I’m not someone who procrastinates ever, and typically I work into the night. But I was needing more sleep and had to go to bed at 8:30. I had to be okay with not doing my usual overstudying, but I also had to keep up my grades.

“I was never going to skip school. Was never going to take a year off.”

SISTER TEAM Her first game back, Lily (on right) played against her sister Allison (on left), who was playing for St. Francis Episcopal. (Courtesy of Dunlap family)

At the same time, Lily was laser focused on reaching her goal to play basketball with her team, and to not take the season off. She had played since she was five years old, she loved the fast pace, she loved that a team can’t have success with just one player. She wasn’t letting cancer take that away. Even though she couldn’t play, Lily went to all the games. “I was the team cheerleader,” she says.

While she worked to keep up with her class and get back to playing basketball, Lily counted the rounds of chemo. When she finished number six, she told herself she was done with half, she knew she could keep going. But physically the treatments were wearing on her. “I’m a very active person,” Lily says, “always have been. So it was all stripped from me. Basically, I went from playing basketball all the time and lifting to just a short sunset walk a day. I never would have called a walk a workout, but even that was getting my heart rate up. I couldn’t get it over 180. So I had to cope with the fact that a walk was as good as I could do.”

Lily’s younger siblings Allison and Joshua were extra supportive. “It was unnerving for them,” Colleen says. “She would come home from treatment, and she would be in really bad shape. Everybody knew she needed space and sleep. They’d go in and hug her the next morning, check on her. And we tried to keep everybody’s routines really normal.”

Having completed treatment, Lily got a clear scan a few days before Thanksgiving. “We had a tremendous amount to be thankful for,” Colleen says. The day after Thanksgiving, she had surgery to remove her port. Then she was cleared to return to basketball. 

“It was great, but it was hard. The warmup tired me out,” Lily says of rejoining her team in December. “I couldn’t show anyone that I was struggling. But I was struggling.” Her team buoyed her spirits. “We all pretended like I wasn’t less fit than before,” she says.

Her first basketball game was December 10. As fate would have it, Lily played against her sister Allison, who played for St. Francis Episcopal School. “It was super special,” Colleen says. “My husband and I had to be Switzerland, cheering for both teams. But the girls were guarding each other and standing together.

“God was watching out for us. This was her coming-back game. And Lily made a three-pointer. The whole place went nuts. There she was, no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. But she was out there doing it.”

Nine months later, Lily says her PR is better than before cancer. “I’m definitely more in shape, and I’m able to push myself as hard as I want to,” Lily says, sharing that her pre-cancer record was bench-pressing 70 pounds. Now she can do 80.

In February, nominated by her St. John’s basketball coach Kathy Halligan, Lily won the national Jersey Mike’s Naismith High School Basketball Courage Award, which recognizes players “who overcome adversity and make a lasting impact on their teams, schools, and communities.” 

“I remember sitting at my desk between classes, and there was a random spam email from a recruiting service,” Coach Halligan says. “The guy was telling us not to forget to nominate athletes for this Naismith Courage Award. I was like, okay, courage award, what’s this about? And then I realized…this is Lily!”

In one week, Coach Halligan, with permission from Lily’s parents, submitted a nomination for Lily. The next week, she heard Lily was a finalist. “No kid should have to go through what Lily did,” Coach Halligan says. “Basketball was her safe place. She worked so hard on her worst of days to be in the gym and around her team and coaches. That I read that spam email…it was meant to be.”

In an unforgettable shot, Lily scored a three-pointer. (Photo: David Shutts)

Colleen says it’s surreal: “If you had asked me last April, when our world was crashing down, we could never have imagined she would be receiving a national award for courage.

“One of the things we’ve talked about a lot is that cancer doesn’t define Lily,” Colleen says. “This is a part of her story, but it doesn’t define her. It’s one of the hardest things she’ll ever go through, and she did it as a 16- and 17-year-old. It’s given her a tremendous amount of strength. But she will still be herself after this.”

Quick to point out that she never wanted to be known as “the cancer kid,” Lily’s hope is that her story might inspire other young people to push through hard things. As she enters her senior year, Lily is excited about the future. “I’m gonna go to college,” she says. “I’m getting out of the south, that’s my plan. Either the East Coast or Midwest. I want to be on my own and independent.” She’s thinking about majoring in the sciences, maybe genetics, maybe medical research.

“Cancer takes away a lot of control in your life. It’s still doing that with my hair. It’s always been long, but it won’t be long again for another year. It’s growing back at its own pace, and there’s nothing I can do about that. But I’m done with the wig. It’s gone.”