Cassidy

"We had a patient who had proton therapy here that I especially remember. He was probably around my age at the time, and he really was a role model for a lot of the young people here. He used to go to the center and round everyone up, and they would just chitchat in the lobby. It was like their own friend group. I would see them almost every day as I walked in to the lobby. Just a sweet kid, really compassionate.

"He actually stopped coming to treatments, just randomly. Nobody knew why. And so everyone tried to contact him, find out what was going on, and he ended up having passed away. Nobody knew about it because his family hadn't decided to reach out, which is understandable"

"I just remember being so terrified because something had happened to him. Obviously we couldn't discuss it out of respect for his family, so nobody could tell the friends he had made here. I remember being so upset about it that I couldn't sit in the lobby. I couldn't bring myself to look at the patients that he used to uplift"

"What was hard was that he didn't even pass away from something that had to do with cancer. It was so unbelievably hard to feel so powerless and not be able to talk about it with anyone. That was a really hard time for me. I remember coming to the lobby and seeing patients leave, and I would start wondering "what if they never came back?"

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