Cover Story: Working on a Dream

Three days after testing positive for COVID-19 and going into isolation, Mary Griffin found out she had cancer. On a Zoom call. Hours from home. At just 19 years old.

A sophomore at Virginia Tech, Griffin was outside of her apartment in Blacksburg, Va., last fall when she took the call. Three hundred miles away in Baltimore, her mother, Kelly, was also on the line. Kelly had planned to be there in person to find out the results from a biopsy done the week before, but Griffin’s positive test for COVID kept her away.

No one was expecting the news they received. A doctor informed the family that the tumor they found on Griffin's pancreas was cancerous.

“I just wanted to hug her,” Kelly Griffin said. “She was being the stronger one. I wanted to get in the car and drive down there and I couldn’t. I told my husband, ‘I don’t care, I want to get her [and bring her home]’ and he said, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t drive in a car with her for five hours.’”

The mind works in mysterious ways in times of stress. Mary Griffin’s initial reaction was to think about losing her hair, but her attention quickly turned to her mother.

“Looking at my mom on a phone screen, being told that her youngest child has cancer, that was the hardest,” she said. “I told her, ‘I promise you I’m OK.’ I didn’t even talk about myself. My main concern was her being upset. It was so hard for her to hear. It hurt my heart.”

When Mary Griffin took the call, standing a socially-distant six feet away from her was the person who may have saved her life — Anne Bryan, an athletic trainer at Virginia Tech.