By Danny Cappiello
Swimming twenty one miles in cold, rough water seems like an impossible feat. But I guess everything is relative. When you have battled cancer and won, very little probably seems impossible. That is the very perspective Allison DeFrancesco has and that is why she has decided to swim the English Channel this September.
Going into her senior year of college, Allison, a native of North County San Diego, was struggling with health problems. She did not know what was going on and threw herself into her collegiate swim training at NYU. But her health did not turn around and she eventually had to have it checked out. She graduated college early and came back to San Diego to get medical attention. Before she could figure out what was happening with her body, she learned some difficult news. Her college coach, Lauren Kyle Beam, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. Lauren was pregnant and lost the baby to the disease. Shortly thereafter, the next wave of bad news hit Alli. She too had cancer, a classic case of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Although diagnosis and treatment started for Lauren only a month or so before Allison’s, the coach and mentor stayed true to her role. She coached Alli through the process, encouraging her to stay positive, remain true to herself and to question the treatment options. All of this, especially the last piece if advice, proved crucial to Alli’s struggle. As it turned out, she had been under-diagnosed and therefore her treatment was not working. She sought out second opinions and her care was eventually transferred to the UCLA Lymphoma Program. [Read more…]