For anyone else, it might just be another summer day in the park.
But for Amanda Saunders that regular Grand Falls-Windsor day in the park means a whole lot more.
At just 23 years old, she has already survived a heart transplant and a very recent fight with a form of lymphoma.
Sitting on a faded picnic table near a duck pond in Church Road Park on July 17, Saunders smiles, the sun dancing off her black sunglasses as she takes in the large central Newfoundland day.
The width of her smiles tells you she hasn’t had many days like this one in her hometown in recent years.
Truth is, she hasn’t. Between her transplant and her cancer treatments, Saunders has spent what she figures is a year of the last year and a
half in Ottawa getting treatment.
“Home for me was a vacation place,” she said. “It felt like Ottawa was my home, which is totally fine ... (but) I did miss home and being able to sleep in my own bed.”
Her latest battle came just a couple of months ago when she was diagnosed with post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder in March. It is a type of lymphoma associated with organ transplant recipients and affects between one and two per cent of patients.
In December of 2019, she had been experiencing intense stomach pains and was at the Ottawa Heart Institute to find out what was wrong with her.
She was diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus and it had attacked her bloodstream, her liver and her gastrointestinal tract.
A couple of months after being treated and released to go back home, Saunders was called back to the hospital. That's when, just shy of her 23rd birthday, she was told she had cancer.
“It was the scariest news I ever received in my life,” she said. “I felt like, ‘here we go again.’”
All of this came at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant Saunders had to face this latest ordeal alone.
Her parents were in Ottawa but unable to be there as their daughter started treatment. To date, Ottawa has had 2,189 of Ontario’s 37,274 confirmed cases of the virus.
“It was terrifying and I was the youngest person in the room each and every time,” said Saunders.
Still, Saunders has been here before.
She had already confronted and conquered a major health scare just over a year earlier and she was going to conquer this one.
“It was the scariest news I ever received in my life. I felt like, ‘here we go again.’”
Saunders took the same approach to her cancer treatment as she did to her transplant. Each day was a new day, take them as they come and keep moving forward.
She was determined to beat cancer.
“Taking one step at a time, don’t sweat the small stuff and only worry when you have to,” said Saunders. “The beginning of the treatments was rough but I could see me improving day by day.”
On June 9, Saunders was told her lymphoma was in remission and she was given a clean bill of health.
Finally, she could make her long-awaited return to her home province.
Seeing her daughter go through what she has at such a young age is something that will stick with Sandra Thomas.
“It has been a long, long road,” she said of her daughter’s journey. “She has come from the depths of being extremely sick and she’s taken it like a trouper.
“I don’t why or how anyone can do what she has gone through.”
For the next month or so, Saunders will head to St. John’s every three weeks for treatments.
When those are finished at the end of August, she will undergo another set of tests to make sure the cancer is completely out of her system.
If it was found to still be there, Saunders would need to continue her treatment.
For anyone else, that news might send them spiralling but after what she’s been through the last two years, Saunders intends to take whatever news she gets in the fall in stride.
“It is OK to feel your emotions ... but at the end of the day, just get back up and take it all in stride,” she said.
Nicholas Mercer is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering central Newfoundland for SaltWire Network. [email protected]