SALT LAKE CITY — Many memorable moments happen during a person's senior year.
But for Quinci Wyatt, what happened right before that has forever changed her life.
The now-18-year-old was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in August and had to let go of a lot of her high school dreams. Despite not being able to attend classes, she was determined, however, to graduate on time and with her class.
"She's fought very hard," said Liz Felt, a teacher at Primary Children's Hospital School Zone who is assigned to help cancer patients. "There were a lot of times I knew she didn't feel well enough to do the work and she did it. She pushed through."
Quinci Wyatt sees graduation as a normal thing teenagers do, and, with a new zest for life, she's excited to be able to do it.
"My advice to other high schoolers would be to not make such a big deal about little, trivial things. You don't realize how little they matter until you have to go through something like this," she said, adding that she was grateful to have the energy to complete her coursework required for graduation and would have given anything just to be able to go to class.
"I feel like I got all the high school without the fun because of cancer," she said.
Kids with cancer definitely don't live a normal life, Felt said, including being taken away from normal school environments depending on their treatment plan. And because chemotherapy can compromise a person's immune system, students with cancer sometimes have to be home-schooled. Treatment plans and various appointments can also mess with a typical school schedule.
Felt coordinates with the patient's teachers at school and then spends time with students each week to help them accomplish assignments and stay on track with their peers.
"I think education is one of the most important tools we can give anybody," she said. "It gives them the opportunity to continue in their school work and still fulfill their role as a student."
Of course, focusing on health is a priority at the hospital, but it's also good to help keep patients' brains active and remind them of life outside of the hospital, Felt said.
Home schooling hasn't been a bad thing, though, especially for Quinci Wyatt's mom.
"I can't say I haven't enjoyed it," Marni Wyatt said. "Usually when your child is a senior in high school, they're just getting ready to be away from you. It hasn't been that way this time."
She said that while it is "every parent's worst nightmare," cancer has brought them closer.
"She's a really strong girl, a lot stronger than she'd ever guess she was," Marni Wyatt said. "There's nothing in the future that can come up that can stop her. She'll always be able to look back and say, 'I can handle that.'"
Soon after the diagnosis, Quinci Wyatt had a pulmonary embolism and had part of a lung removed in surgery. Then she dealt with some adverse reactions to some of the heavy-hitting cancer medications she was taking. It was about four months of feeling awful.
"The worst," she said. "It was terrible."
The intensive chemotherapy resulted in nerve damage in her feet. She also walks on her toes to avoid the pain of really tight muscles in her legs. And, she has fond memories of her once very long, blond hair.
"I'm just ready to move forward and not let it consume my whole life," Quinci Wyatt said. Her mother would say that she is "better off" having gone through it all, though, because it taught her what she is capable of.
"Cancer sucks. Cancer is brutal," Felt said. "It has the potential to take a lot away physically and mentally. It's a disease that doesn't play favorites, either."
But just like with Quinci Wyatt, Felt said a lot can be gained from the experience as well.
"She just has this perspective on life that is really unique," Felt said about Quinci Wyatt. "She has the ability to laugh at herself and to roll with the punches. She's resilient. She's just warm. She's someone you want to spend time with."
Felt spends about an hour each week with cancer patients at Primary Children's. Sometimes she needs additional help with certain subjects and is able to enlist the help of volunteer tutors.
"Some things are hard to do without a teacher," said Kristi McMurtrey, a math teacher at Olympus and Granger high schools in the Granite School District. She has been volunteering her tutor services at the hospital for about three years and said she will continue to do so as long as time allows.
"Just knowing that I'm helping somebody in a way that I know they can't help themselves, even if they wanted to, is satisfying," McMurtrey said. Helping patients focus on their goals and on the future, she said, helps to normalize their experience.
"No matter what, they're just a kid working on their math," she said. "It puts them back in the same arena as every other kid."
Marni Wyatt said Quinci wouldn't have had the motivation to graduate without help from the hospital's School Zone program. It kept her going during the times she had to stay in the hospital for more than a month at the beginning of her treatment.
The relationship formed with the young cancer patients also symbiotically helps the teachers.
"I often run into kids there who are looking on the bright side no matter what they're dealing with," McMurtrey said. She enjoys seeing kids work hard to do hard things.
A year ago, Quinci Wyatt might have thought her senior year would have been the hardest thing she had yet to accomplish. Never would she have believed she would conquer her cancer in the same amount of time … and still graduate.
"I'm so proud of her for the work and persistence and for not giving up," Felt said. "She had every reason to."
And while she's there to be the teacher, Felt said she also does a fair amount of learning as she watches young patients and their families deal with such difficult circumstances.
"So many of them are so accepting of what they have to deal with and trusting of the process, I think, which is something I admire in kids, is their ability to handle what they need to handle," Felt said.
"It was super hard and not how I expected to spend my senior year," Quinci Wyatt said. "But it was good because I got to see how much people cared about me."
The experience, which she hopes she doesn't have to endure again via relapse, she said, was "absolutely a faith-building thing."
Thursday was her last intensive chemotherapy treatment after 10 months of weekly infusions.
"It proved to me that I have hope," she said.
Quinci Wyatt felt good enough to go to her senior prom and will indeed walk with her beloved East High School senior class on June 6 at the Jon M. Huntsman Center at the neighboring University of Utah. And she will gladly wear a white cap and gown, as it is much better than the hospital gown she's donned one too many times in the last year.
"I'm so excited," she said. "It's like I never thought this would happen and here I am. I hope I can go about my life not having the constant reminder that I can't do things because of cancer."