Ananya Bashyam had just started her first job out of college when one morning her vision went completely black.
It was September 2021, and she had only been in this Houston high school biology teacher position with Teach for America for a few weeks. “New city, new job, lots of life transitions,” Bashyam told TODAY.com.
That morning she had woken up and lost her sight as soon as she got out of bed. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but this time, “my vision remained black until I sat down again,” she recalls. “And I felt really dizzy, so (it was) quite worrying.”
Her urine also turned dark brown and she started feeling “really sick,” like she had the flu, says Bashyam, who grew up in Flower Mound, Texas. She still went to work, she said, and continued to feel worse and worse.
That weekend, she finally went to the emergency room. There, her lab work felt “super weird,” she says. Her blood cell count was a little low, but doctors were more concerned about her liver count, which was surprisingly high.
“Their first thought was that she had liver failure,” says Bashyam.
She was rushed to the local emergency room and remained in hospital for the next two weeks, thinking she had a serious liver problem. But while his liver counts slowly improved, his blood cell counts gradually got worse.
It was a unclear and difficult time for her, she said.
“I honestly don’t even remember most of it because I was so beside myself,” Bashyam reflects. “I was getting blood transfusion after blood transfusion, and I was going in and out of really high fevers.”
Her doctors eventually called in other specialists, who then ordered a blood marrow biopsy, which revealed the true cause of her frightening symptoms.
At age 22, he was diagnosed with leukemia
Amidst all these new life changes, Bashyam was diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic lymphoma.
It is an aggressive, fast-growing type of bone marrow cancer that is more common in children, Dr. Musa Yilmaz, associate professor in the department of leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center, told TODAY.com. “And if it’s not treated, it’s a fatal disease,” he said.
Thanks to therapeutic advances made over the past decade, “we are able to cure a significant number of patients with this disease, but the treatment process is not easy,” says Yilmaz, who is also Bashyam’s doctor.
For Bashyam, treatment was unusually long and difficult as she experienced multiple relapses.
Her first round of chemotherapy began just days after arriving at MD Anderson, she says, and the treatment lasted about four to five months.
“I feel like every complication you imagine, like chemotherapy, happened in those four months,” including multiple infections due to an immunocompromised system, she recalls. “There’s not much you can do when you’re down to single digit platelets and zero white blood cells.”
After four cycles of chemotherapy, Bashyam moved on to four cycles of a new drug: a targeted immunotherapy called blinatumomab.
It targets two specific sites on the body’s T cells, which are part of the immune system, and uses them to “bring the cancer cell close to the T cells” and activate the T cells, Yilmaz says. This way, the drug uses your own immune system to target cancer cells.
The drug “has changed the landscape” of treating this type of cancer, he says, but it requires a substantial commitment from the patient. “It’s a 24/7 infusion,” Bashyam explains, which meant she was connected to it at all times and had to carry it with her.
But it was worth it: After about a year of treatment, she was in remission.
A stem cell transplant and a “brutal” recovery
Once in remission, Bashyam was allowed to return to teaching, “which was really fun,” she says.
Unfortunately, after just six months of teaching and just eight months after stopping blinatumomab, a bone marrow biopsy revealed that his cancer had returned in early 2023.
His medical team decided to try CAR T cell therapy, a treatment that uses a patient’s own immune cells to make an immunotherapy drug designed to fight cancer cells.
Although it helped, “it didn’t completely eliminate the disease,” Bashyam says. “After that, the only thing left to do was a stem cell transplant.”
It was a daunting prospect. But on the bright side, she says, her younger brother turned out to be a perfect donor. “He’s like my best friend in the world,” she says, “so it was pretty beautiful that he was able to do that for me,” she says.
And in June, the stem cell transplant took place. Beforehand, she underwent full-body radiation and high-dose chemotherapy to wipe out her own immune system. So the day of the transplant seemed a bit “disappointing,” she laughs.
But soon after, the “really brutal” recovery began, Bashyam says, which included graft-versus-host disease, causing excruciatingly painful gastrointestinal complications.
After about six weeks in the hospital, she was able to start moving forward and slowly regained her strength. She planned to take the rest of the year to recover.
But then again, cancer had other plans. Just two months after the stem cell transplant, Bashyam’s disease relapsed a second time.
“Relapses of this disease are not common,” Yilmaz says, and facing another one with even fewer treatment choices on the table left Bashyam scared.
Before the stem cell transplant, she said, it had been presented to her as the last option – and it hadn’t worked. Her doctors ultimately decided to put her back on blinatumomab, the immunotherapy she had tried after chemotherapy.
A few months later, she was back in remission. And, in the fall of 2024, she began medical school in Chicago.
Mental and emotional toll of a cancer diagnosis in young adults
Bashyam managed to attend medical school while continuing to take the immunotherapy drug for four weeks straight, carrying it with her to class in a Baggu or Lululemon bag. She got creative with sleeping positions and looked into spinning classes “because I could just hang the bag on the bike handlebars.”
She continued to take her medication until the end of her first year of medical school, when her doctor decided she had been in remission long enough. And she hasn’t taken it since, over a year now, with no signs of relapse so far.
Now in her third year, Bashyam gets her childhood vaccinations again and reflects on everything she’s been through.
Of course, there is never a “right” time to have cancer. But coping with the diagnosis and the ups and downs of the treatment process was particularly difficult during this period of his life, Bashyam says.
“It’s just an exceptionally strange and sad age to be diagnosed because you’re just supposed to start your next chapter of life,” she says, “and everyone I knew was moving on and building their adult lives, and I felt stuck in the same place.”
Battling the disease “becomes a lifetime,” she says, adding that the physical changes have also taken a toll on her self-esteem. “All the steroids make your face really big, and the rest of my body looks like a twig,” she says. “If I looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself.”
“The kind of doctor I want to be”
Bashyam had always wanted to go to medical school, but seeing the darker, sadder realities of what healthcare sometimes requires made her wonder if she was really cut out for it.
“I had so many traumatic memories in the hospital,” she says. “I didn’t know I wanted to spend the rest of my life working in a hospital. »
It was the kindness and support of those around her, especially her medical team, that helped her get through it, she says. For example, she remembers the doctor who brought her a cake and a birthday card on the day of her stem cell transplant, a “rebirth” tradition for patients that Bashyam had wanted to participate in but was unable to implement in the difficult days leading up to her transplant.
“It was really beautiful,” she recalls. “I was like, this is the kind of doctor I want to be.”
And she began sharing her experience on TikTok, with a mix of vulnerable dark humor and simply showing the realities of a young cancer survivor balancing her health with her medical training and social life.
Today, Bashyam is still in remission and undergoes regular biopsies. She knows that cancer will be a part of her life for a long time. But she’s learned to celebrate her victories, even the ones that may seem small, whether it’s growing back her first hair after chemotherapy or delivering a placenta on her own for the first time.
For Yilmaz, Bashyam’s story is a powerful reminder that not all cancer journeys are easy. “It’s like a marathon, with lots of ups and downs,” he says. And seeing her achieve her goals — in the medical field, no less — should be a sign of hope for patients facing a similarly difficult path, he adds.
Gn Health
