It started with the itching.

Kayla Case noticed the discomfort while breastfeeding her then 1-year-old daughter.

“I would itch in the middle of the night and make myself bleed and not realize it,” said Case, an Eastern Shore resident.

When a lymph node in her armpit swelled, her doctor started tests, but her symptoms persisted.

Then in December 2023, days before her daughter’s second birthday, Case got her answer: cancer.

The diagnosis launched the hardest year of Case’s life, during which she endured six months of chemotherapy while raising two toddlers, pursuing her National Board Certification in teaching and studying for her second master’s degree.

This week, Case emerged from her battle triumphant. She graduated from Towson University with a master’s degree in education for reading with an endorsement in English for speakers of other languages.

Case, 35, said she’d been terrified of losing the chance to see more of her children’s lives. She decided that wasn’t an option.

“Something that cancer has helped me recognize ... is that, if you can’t change something, there’s just no point in worrying about it,” Case said. “So that was pretty much how we battled this. We couldn’t change it. The best we could do was fight it.”

Preparing for battle

Case’s husband, Brandon, was shocked by her diagnosis: Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the immune system.

“On some level, there was kind of this weird mix of relief of, OK, now we know why that’s happening,” said Brandon Case, 40. “But it’s also like, oh, you know, it’s cancer.”

Because it had spread to her spleen, past the midpoint on her body, Kayla Case’s cancer was considered Stage 3, necessitating a more aggressive treatment, she said.

Case started chemotherapy in February last year. But the treatment “essentially caused a paralysis of my gut,” Case said, which she described as feeling like “lightning in my stomach, 24/7.”

She switched to a new treatment, which Case said was a “much kinder and gentler approach,” though still difficult on her body and her family.

A formerly active person who loved hiking and walked three to five miles a day, Case struggled some days to get out of bed. She couldn’t carry her kids, Serena and Silas, and sometimes had to turn down their requests to cuddle because she was feeling nauseated.

Case’s husband accompanied her to every one of her three- to four-hour treatments. A technical manager for a small business, he would work on his laptop while she read or watched TV, binging “House” and “Reba.”

Case and her husband had been looking forward to regaining independence as their kids got older. Instead, Brandon Case had to start caring for his wife, with help from his mom and in-laws.

Growing up, he had taken care of family through long-term medical issues, but this felt different.

“I‘ve never had it be, like, my person,” Brandon Case said. “I would look at her, too, just have pain on her face, and there’s just absolutely nothing that can make it better.”

He shaved off his wife’s hair, and fortunately the kids adjusted to the change quickly.

“My husband shaves his head, so they were like, ‘You look like Papa,’” Kayla Case said, laughing. “I was like, ‘I do look like Papa.’”

Fighting on multiple fronts

For her first three months of treatment, Case stayed home from her job at Georgetown East Elementary in Annapolis as a math and literacy intervention teacher.

On Case’s treatment Wednesdays, her colleagues wore purple, the color for Hodgkin lymphoma awareness.

Because Case explained her appointments to her kids as Mommy “fighting dragons,” staff also wore dragon pins. Ahead of Case’s return to school, teachers decorated her classroom with a large dragon cutout taken from a Scholastic book fair that now bears the words “Slay Queen.”

Staff made two prayer shawls — one for her, one for her kids — that nearly every staff member contributed at least a couple of stitches to.

When she returned part time at the end of last school year, Case refused to hide what she was going through, showing up bald with a smile, said Alisa Booberg, the school’s principal.

“It was really a learning experience for the children, for our students, and she was very honest with them,” Booberg said.

On days when she went to work, Case would try to spend every minute after she got home until her kids went to bed with them. At night, she would sit with her computer and work on her National Board Certification, a prestigious credential for teachers, or grad school.

“I know I would have given up. If it was me in her shoes, I probably would have paused my grad program,” Brandon Case said. “I‘m just very proud and impressed by what she has done and what she’s accomplished.”

Kayla Case earned her first master’s degree in teaching and early-childhood education while transitioning out of her previous career in marketing and management. She worked as a kindergarten teacher at Georgetown East before starting intervention work in 2022.

Her favorite intervention program is called Orton-Gillingham, which uses physical touch to help kids build literacy skills. It’s particularly meaningful to Case, who said experiencing mental fog and fatigue was one of the hardest parts of undergoing cancer treatment. Sometimes, it was hard to put coherent thoughts together, she said.

“I felt a lot less intelligent, which was a real big struggle for me,” Case said. “I had prided myself on my reading and my word choice, and all of the sudden, all these things just stopped making sense.”

She said the experience has given her a greater understanding of what her students go through. At Georgetown East, 22% of the kids are multilingual learners.

“I‘m not dual language like many of my students, but I was searching my brain for the answer and I knew it was there but it wasn’t coming,” Case said. “I can very much relate to that feeling of anxiety that starts to build because somebody is looking at you, expecting an answer.”

Retiring from combat

A week after Case’s treatments ended in July last year, her family made up for lost time by going to every play museum and park they could find. Then she got to start the school year last August by telling her colleagues the results of her first scan post-treatment: She was cancer free.

In remission, Case still has to get periodic checkups and scans to monitor for recurrence.

But, as life opens up before her, Case plans to focus on being a present working mom. After the 2024 her family had, that’s her definition of slowing down.

“It has made me incredibly proud of myself and what I‘ve accomplished in that time, knowing that I can do really hard things,” Case said. “But it also has made me go, ‘OK, it’s time to take a break from doing really hard things and do some easy things.’”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner‘s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.