Miracle Moment: Christina Soriero

Doctors diagnosed 22-year-old Christina Soriero with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was just 18.

It was a time in her life when the only thing she should have been dealing with was senioritis and getting ready for life after high school.

“I got super, super, super sick, to the point where I couldn’t lift up my own head,” said Soriero. “I couldn’t really hold up my body. I was coughing so hard that I was wheezing.”

Her doctor ordered a CT Scan, which revealed enlarged lymph nodes everywhere.

“Everyone’s just kind of staring at me. It’s a roomful of doctors and nurses and my parents, and everyone just looking at me, waiting for me to react,” said Soriero, “and I kind of just came to the conclusion, like, what’s the point of being upset about something that I quite literally cannot change?”

Soriero decided to get ready for battle.

But something you don’t always hear about cancer treatment is that it can cause infertility.

Soriero says she wanted to beat cancer and be a mom.

“I tried to do IVF to preserve my eggs just because, you know, chemo can have not a good effect on them, but in that time, my lungs collapsed, and my heart and trachea were about to follow,” said Soriero. “My heart was being crushed by the tumors in my chest, so he was like, ‘Yeah, you need to go, you need to be admitted.'”

Soriero spent two weeks in the intensive care unit.

When she was well enough and she started to lose her hair, she had a head shaving party.

Soriero fought on her terms and survived, and she even has a tattoo to prove it.

“Exactly a year after I got diagnosed, I got my survivor tattoo,” said Soriero, “and then, for my type of cancer, it’s two years of being in remission. That means you’re cancer-free, so two years later, I went in, I added the dot, so kind of just like the end.”

Soriero’s cancer story is punctuated by positivity.

“I don’t look back on my cancer journey as being like a time of like sadness or anger or like, resentment or anything like that,” Soriero said. “I look back on it, and it was just so full of love and happiness and togetherness.”

Soriero is studying psychology and wants to use her degree to help kids with cancer and their families.

She was also able to complete a couple of rounds of IVF and says one way or another, she will be a mom someday.

Christina Soriero is our Miracle Moment.