Two minutes after meeting Melinda Marchiano, three things become obvious: She is crazy cute, she has energy to spare, and yeah, she can kick cancer’s butt.
In fact, it’s easy to believe Melinda can do whatever she sets her mind to—or even just half her mind to. Beating cancer was just one item to check off, because Melinda has a list of lofty goals.
Right now, her main aim is to touch as many people as possible with her book, Grace: A Child’s Intimate Journey Through Cancer, which she published through her publishing company Happy Quail. The book chronicles her experience with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Melinda was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s in 2007 when she was just 13. After six months of treatment to eradicate the disease, Melinda began journaling her emotions as a way of dealing with her feelings during recovery. Soon, she had filled several notebooks.
“I wrote pretty much every day,” she said. “Some days I wrote for hours, and other days it wouldn’t come. I pretty much had to re-experience everything, and when I did that, it was easy to write.”
At the time, Melinda had no intention of creating a book—she simply wanted to cope with the situation—but halfway through the process, she realized there was a purpose for her creative blasts of energy.
“I had the majority of it done when I decided this might become more than just scribbles in a notebook,” she said.
“I knew it couldn’t stay in the spiral notebooks, because it would help a lot of people,” Lee Marchiano, Melinda’s mother, said as tears welled up in her eyes.
The book has indeed helped a lot of people to know they’re not alone in their fight. Lee helps her daughter with the e-mails she gets in response to her book. People share their experiences of not only battling cancer, but of the recovery process, which Lee said is extremely hard and produces a lot of side effects.
When Melinda reads e-mails about how others have dealt with their battles, she considers herself lucky because she had something that pulled her through the tough times. A dancer since she was 3 years old, Melinda got permission from her doctor to continue to participate in her passion during her treatment and recovery.
“I danced through treatment when I was strong enough,” Melinda said. “I’m a creative person: I play piano, sew, and I love to write. Dance is creative like that. It’s very expressive. It’s kind of cool—you can touch people through dance and send a message and not ever say anything.”
She credits dance with helping her through the toughest parts of her battle. Now that she’s triumphant, she participates in the San Luis Obispo Civic Ballet and the San Luis Obispo Jazz Dancers. She also dances at Nipomo High School, which she’s done since her freshman year. Prior to Melinda, dance teacher Christina Belo never accepted a freshman dance student because such newcomers didn’t have developed techniques.
“I’ll never forget watching her dance on the day of the audition,” Belo said of Melinda. “She was stunning, she had such a maturity about her dancing.”
Since then, Melinda—who is now in her junior year—has taken on more of a leadership role in the school’s dance company and is choreographing pieces for other students.
“People look at her as inspirational for what they want to do in life, whatever that is,” Belo said.
Melinda wants to keep dancing—and writing. Her book was named a finalist in the ForeWord Review Book of the Year Awards, the winners of which will be announced in June. But Melinda has set her sights beyond the summer.
When she graduates, she plans to study biochemistry at Stanford and then go on to medical school to become a doctor.
“And of course, I always want to keep writing and always keep dancing,” she said.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone applauds the power of passion. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 21-28, 2011.