About Deandra Lalonde

My Story

In 2018 I was 26 and living my best life as a city girl in Toronto. I had a long term boyfriend I loved and together we had done a cross country road trip in the summer of 2017, I biked or walked to my job at the intersection of technology and book publishing, I had a robust social life spending time with friends, I went to pilates or yoga in the morning or after work and hit the gym at lunch. I was active, social, thriving. I had just done dry January and felt like the healthiest person in the world because of it, when I was taking a bath one night and felt a lump in my breast. A month (and a few invasive tests) later, I got my diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

I had to spend a month in the hospital because I had no immune system, so for all of March 2018 I lived at Princess Margaret Hospital, seeing my mom, my boyfriend, or my best friend for a few hours a day before they'd have to leave for lights out. I had three different roommates and two different rooms during this period, hooked up through a Hickman line (a direct portal to my heart to pump in my drugs) to an IV pole 24/7 (literally, I showered, went to the bathroom, walked the hallways, slept, all plugged into a machine). Getting out of the hospital was really just the beginning. What followed was two and a bit years of high dose steroids making me gain 40+lbs and a moon face to match, hard core chemotherapy (not that there is a non-hard core chemo) that made me lose my hair, 10+ lumbar punctures where they took spinal fluid and injected chemo directly into my spine/brain, and countless needles. But I pushed through and finished my treatment protocol in June 2020.

Finishing treatment has its own difficulties. Suddenly you are out on your own after years of being seen by a doctor every week or so. Being an AYA (adolescent and young adult) with cancer also brings its own challenges, and everyone assumes as soon as you are done treatment you're back to normal, but side effects persist, and I don't think the brain fog has ever fully dissipated. Two years after finishing treatment I had to have my hip replacement (a side effect of the steroids), which makes you feel abnormal to your peers once again when you are the youngest one in the waiting room at the orthopaedic surgeons or rehab centre.

It's taken me the last 5 years since finishing treatment to start to feel more like my old self again. But through those five years, I've finished my schooling in nutrition, I've gotten back into the pool, I've gotten married to that same boyfriend, and I've moved to a new city. Now that I am finally feeling more like me, I'm ready to give back.