Prognosis Positive
"Life has thrown many curveballs my way and I’ve had to fight like hell to get back up each time." – Maddy Gray '26
Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the May 11, 2026, issue of Business West magazine as part of its annual Salute to Nurses section under the headline, "Despite a Cancer Diagnosis, She Refused to Let the Dream Die." Since then, Gray received her nursing pin and graduated with the Class of 2026 on May 30.
By George O'Brien
Business West
Maddy Gray decided to attend the nurse-pinning ceremony at Holyoke Community College a year ago. She described it as an attempt at finding some type of closure.
She should have been up on the stage getting her pin, but instead, she was in the audience looking up at her classmates and coping with a sea of emotions resulting from a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatment that left her firm of the opinion that her decade-long dream of becoming a nurse had come to a bitter end one semester short of the finish line.
“At that point, I was so sure, so positive that this job wasn’t for me anymore,” said Gray, who told BusinessWest that it was a big hug from Johanna Kassidi, one of her professors, that night and her simple comment, ‘I hope that you’re coming back in the spring — we need more nurses like you in this field,’ that made her think that maybe, just maybe, the dream wasn’t dead after all.
Fast-forwarding through six months of chemotherapy, an eventual diagnosis that she was in remission, and that last semester at school, Gray will be back for another nurse-pinning ceremony in a few weeks, and this time she will be on stage, dealing with a completely different set of emotions that could not have been imagined a year ago.
When her name is called, it will mark the climactic end to a truly remarkable story of perseverance that began almost a decade before it was confirmed that she had cancer and, actually, long before that, when this foster child who was abandoned by her mother while her father was serving a life’s sentence, fought an ongoing battle with thoughts that she couldn’t achieve the goals that most others take for granted.
Gray spent many years not really knowing what to do with her life. Fighting through the stigma of foster childhood, she obtained her GED and began her college journey in 2012, not really knowing which direction it would take. She thought about early childhood education and other realms where she could work with children. But things changed when a friend talked enthusiastically about her nursing degree and the work she would be doing.
So, she decided to pursue a Nursing degree herself. But there would be life challenges to confront, including young children and the availability of childcare, forcing her to attend at night, a course or two at a time.
She was making her way toward her degree, when she was confronted with a challenge that was formidable as it was unforeseen.
Indeed, Gray told BusinessWest that she was driving to class when she felt a strange lump on her neck. It would take months before it was officially determined that she had a large mass in the center of her chest and it was cancer, specifically Hodgkins Lymphoma. She remembers telling a close friend that she would have to drop out of nursing school to battle the disease.
And it was early in the treatment stage that she ventured to the nurse-pinning ceremony, a time when she was not at all sure she would survive the cancer, let alone return to school and complete her degree program.
“I was so close … I was one semester away from graduating, I was crossing that finish line,” she recalled. “And I got hit with that. I was pretty depressed for a long time, and I was convinced that I was never going to be a nurse; I had worked toward something since 2016 that was my dream, and now it was ripped out of my hands and gone forever.”
Until it wasn’t, thanks to those words of encouragement from Kassidi and Gray’s own determination to move forward with her last semester of work, even as she was still waiting to find out conclusively if she was in remission.
As the 2026 nurse-pinning ceremony approaches, Gray has been doing some reflecting, while also getting on with the next stages of her journey.
Indeed, as she braces for the National Council Licensure Exam (NCLEX), she has been offered a job on the mental health unit at Baystate Franklin Hospital in Greenfield and is expected to start in August, if not sooner.
As for that pinning ceremony itself, she knows it will be an emotional time, one a world apart from what she was experiencing a year ago.
“I’ll be standing in the front getting pinned, looking out toward where was I was standing a year ago, feeling hopeless, that my dreams were unfairly ripped away from me,” she said. “This year, I’m going to be standing there, thinking about all the things I’ve endured in my life. Being able to get back up and do it … I’m grateful for that, so it will be a very emotional moment.”
Putting her long journey into perspective, she said there are lessons for others — about not giving up and not letting go of dreams, even when the obstacles seem insurmountable, but also about listening to those who provide encouragement and taking full advantage of the many resources available to those who want to pursue their own goals.
Her message to all is summed up in a scholarship essay she wrote and read at a ceremony for scholarship recipients in 2024, well before her cancer diagnosis. Here’s a passage:
“Thinking back to all I’ve survived, the common denominator is clear, it’s resilience. Life has thrown many curveballs my way and I’ve had to fight like hell to get back up each time. Some hit way harder than others, which made getting back up increasingly more difficult, but the alternative seemed worse. Staying down meant giving up on myself, and for a time, I did give up. … Thankfully, I woke up and decided that enough was enough. I had finally come to the realization that the only thing holding me back was myself.”
She stopped holding herself back long ago, and in the years to come she determined that nothing else would her hold her back. Not even cancer.
PHOTOS by CHRIS YURKO: (Thumbnail) Maddy Gray '26 at the HCC Center for Health Education & Simulation this spring. (Above) Gray receives her nursing pin during a May 2026 pinning ceremony in the Leslie Phillips Theater.
