Nestled safely in a back closet inside Carla Lloyd’s home is a green plastic container filled with cards.

There are cards from her mother, sister, cousins, colleagues, church friends, former students and nurse practitioners. There are funny cards, get well soon cards, “get well-er” cards and homemade cards.

The cards are from a time in Lloyd’s life that, each October, creeps back into her memory. They are a reminder of her battle with breast cancer. A battle in which Lloyd, an advertising professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, came out the victor.

Her friend Karen Bakke, a fashion design professor at Syracuse University, sent her handmade cards, Bakke’s specialty since childhood.

Brenda Wrigley, a former Newhouse professor who now teaches at Emerson College, would spend half an hour in Hallmark, looking for the perfect card.

“I probably should have had stock in Hallmark,” she said.

Lloyd kept every single one.

The cards used to hang around the kitchen sink, winding up and down the cabinets and wrapping around the windowsill. They acted as an “arc of positive energy.”

But Lloyd didn’t just receive cards. She sent them too.

“Every time I did something for her she’d send me a thank you card,” said Nancy Bunn, Lloyd’s friend of more than 15 years. “That’s the kind of person she is.”

Today, there are no cards hanging around the windowsill in Lloyd’s kitchen. Now there is only a small nameless, faceless figurine sitting on the windowsill. He holds a wire balloon with the word “hope.”

Each day, Lloyd looks at this figurine, a gift from her cousin, a fellow breast cancer survivor, and reminds herself to have hope.

When Lloyd was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2011, she was shocked. She had been getting mammograms since she was in her 40s, didn’t smoke or drink and didn’t have a history of breast cancer with her mother or sister.

In May 2010, she went in for her annual mammogram. The doctors found a cyst on her right breast, toward her ribcage. They decided to keep an eye on it.

“So I went about my life, with this cyst over here,” Lloyd said.

But then the cyst began to hurt. At her next mammogram in June 2011, it was reexamined and the doctors found there was a cancerous tumor growing beneath the cyst.

She had stage 3 breast cancer.

Lloyd was alone when she got the diagnosis. She began to cry, the first of only two times she’d cry throughout the entire process. She felt as if she was being “lowered into a well, a deep well, dark and black.”

But Lloyd didn’t have much time to dwell on the diagnosis. Later that month she had a lumpectomy to have the tumor removed and in August she began chemotherapy.

“Once you’re diagnosed it’s like you board this high-speed train and you enter into this world of medicine very quickly and very, very deeply,” Lloyd said. “And that became my life for a year.”

That first round of chemotherapy was followed by two more. Lloyd also elected to have radiation treatment and a bilateral mastectomy, or both of her breasts removed. Because of the type of breast cancer Lloyd had – a kind in which the presence of the HER2 protein makes cancer cells grow more rapidly – she also received additional treatments.

For Lloyd, fighting cancer was a full-time job. Her calendars from the summer of 2011 to the fall of 2012 are filled to the brim with neat notes detailing treatments, blood tests and counseling.

Lloyd, who also co-founded the Fashion and Beauty Communications Milestone, has worked at Newhouse for 31 years. Work is her life. But she took the 2011-2012 school year off.

“I was the same person, but I was a different person,” she said. “My work shifted. My work shifted to trying to fight cancer.”

Wrigley, the Emerson professor, was a huge source of support for Lloyd. She sat with Lloyd’s husband and son in the waiting room during her surgeries and came to visit when Lloyd was recovering.

“It was hard as her friend to see her that way,” she said. “But that’s what friends do.”

Though Lloyd was endlessly positive, there were times it was impossible to deny she was a cancer patient, like when she began to lose her hair.

To make the transition from her long hair to no hair easier, Lloyd bought a wig and had her hairstylist cut her hair into the same style as the wig.

For Lloyd, a wig was a necessity – she discovered that her skull was “not pretty,” she said with a laugh.

Bakke, who co-founded the Fashion and Beauty Communications Milestone with Lloyd, said she knew the wig would have to be “fabulous.” And it was.

“I said, ‘Oh my god, I want hair that looks like that,’” Bakke said, laughing.

People would stop Lloyd as she walked down the street to ask where she got her hair cut.

Lloyd knew she “had more life to live.” But she still had moments of doubt, moments where she questioned her fate. One of them – the only time she cried after receiving her diagnosis – was when Steve Jobs died.

“I was still in treatment going, ‘I wonder if that will be me. Will the chemo be able to stop it?’” she said.

But the chemo did stop it. Her treatments ended in October 2012. And after more than a year of nonstop cancer treatment, it all came to an abrupt halt.

Appointment by appointment, she had finally been raised up from the deep, dark well she fell into when she was diagnosed. She’s not technically in remission yet – that comes after five years – but she’s on her way.

“Am I out of the well? Well, I’m not yet determined a survivor, but I’m up in the light, not way down there in the dark,” Lloyd said.

In the fall of 2012, Lloyd returned to Newhouse after her year of medical leave. She was still finishing up a few treatments and wearing her wig, but most of her students didn’t know about the breast cancer.

Still, those students, particularly in ADV 307: Conceptual and Creative Thinking in Media Planning – a class Lloyd was teaching for the first time – will always be special to her.

For her entire career, Lloyd has used a purple felt-tip pen to grade her students’ papers. But now, she uses a green pen. The purple pen was retired with those students from ADV 307.

Today, cancer is not a part of Lloyd’s everyday life. It’s not something she talks about often. The disease comes to the forefront of her mind in October, during breast cancer awareness month, and every few months when she has blood tests to check on her progress.

They still make her nervous. Her next test is on Nov. 7.

But she remains hopeful – as the figurine that sits on her windowsill reminds her to every day – that the cancer will stay away.

“For the time being, I can live my life and hope that I’m not revisited,” Lloyd said. “But if that’s what happens, I’ll start the battle again.”

Published on October 30, 2014 at 12:31 am

Contact Casey: cffabris@syr.edu | @caseyfabris