Page 58 - WilmU Spring Summer 2013

M.S., Administration of Justice (in progress)
M.S., Administration of Human Services ‘13
B.S., Psychology ‘10
ocial worker, student, blogger,
volunteer, cancer survivor.
In life experience, Mya
Oliveras is much older than her
27 years.
But today, she feels reborn.
“What doesn’t destroy you nourishes
you,” she says, and she takes that motto
with her through every challenge, setback,
tragedy and struggle in her life. It’s on her
blog, her business card and her heart.
Three times in 10 years, Mya has come
face to face with her own mortality. She
was first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease,
a cancer of the lymphatic tissue, when she
was a senior in high school. She underwent
chemotherapy, lost her hair, went to prom
and still graduated with her class.
The cancer returned in 2007, and
doctors decided to perform an autologous
stem-cell transplant, which basically means
her own cells were harvested to kill the
cancerous ones. After more chemo, she
was in remission again.
All was well until 2011. The cancer was
back again. She braced herself for what
was coming.
As she began her third round of
chemotherapy, Mya’s doctor told her she
would need a bone marrow transplant.
They had trouble finding a donor, and as
the weeks ticked by, Mya and her family
were losing hope. She couldn’t help but
think, This might be the end. It was a dark
time, full of fear and uncertainty.
It got even darker when police came
to her door at 1 a.m. to deliver some
grim news. Her father, Manuel Oliveras,
had been shot to death in Wilmington in
what was later classified as an attempted
robbery. He was 51 years old.
It was almost too much to bear. Mya had
just seen her dad that day, “just a casual
‘Hello, how are you, just stopping by’ kind
of thing,” she says. Now, amid the health
crisis she was already experiencing, she
now found herself trying to comfort her
family through unspeakable tragedy.
And then came the transplant. Days
after her father’s death, a donor match was
found. All she knows about her donor is
that he is male and lives in Brazil.
Mya went in for surgery in July of 2012.
The procedure itself, she says, took all of
15 minutes. But the weeks that followed
were gut-wrenching. She spent much
of the summer of 2012 in a quarantined
room in Christiana Hospital, fighting off
an endless slew of side effects, including
nausea, itching and dizziness. At one point
she was prescribed close to 60 different
medications. And, for the third time, she
lost her hair.
“When my family came to visit me, they
had to wear a mask, so it was almost like
feeling completely isolated from human
contact even when you are surrounded
by people,” Mya recalls. “But, I just kept
telling myself, ‘It will get better. It has to
get better.’ ”
She says she now has the immune
system of a 1-year-old. She can celebrate
her good health and move on with her life,
knowing that the longer she goes without
complications, the more likely it is that the
cancer is gone.
But it’s hard to celebrate these days.
Mya admits she hasn’t fully dealt with the
loss of her father. She’s been filling her
time with work, school, doctor’s appoint-
ments, volunteering for the Leukemia and
Lymphoma Society and blogging. But it
does help to know one thing: The man
police say is responsible for her father’s
death is now behind bars.
The suspect in the shooting, a 19-year-
old man, eluded police for nine months and
was arrested on Jan. 8, 2013. He’s awaiting
trial on capital murder charges.
Manuel Oliveras had always encouraged
his youngest daughter to get her doctorate.
She had planned to do so, but after he was
killed, she didn’t think she could handle the
time commitment and the workload. So she
enrolled at Wilmington University in her
second master’s program in Administration
of Justice, with an expected graduation in
spring 2014.
Mya’s no stranger to struggle. After all,
she earned her high school diploma, her
bachelor’s in psychology and her master’s
– in Administration of Human Services – all
while fighting her illness.
But nowadays, she just wants to live
a calm, happy life. She’s lost 22 pounds
in the past year, mainly due to a strict
post-transplant diet and a lot of healthy
home cooking, courtesy of her mother,
Mecca, who lived with Mya after her
transplant. Now that her hair’s growing
back, she plans to donate all of her wigs to
pediatric cancer patients. She just finished
her schedule of anti-rejection medication.
She scored a new job in May, transitioning
out of government social work and into
the nonprofit sector. And she’s helping
to organize a team for the Leukemia and
Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night walk
this summer.
“I just want to work on me for awhile,”
she says. WU
Cancer, Death and Rebirth
MYA JORDAN OLIVERAS
WILMINGTON UNIVERSIT Y MAGAZINE