Rebecca just turned 22, but her poise, insight, and achievements suggest someone far older. With a career already spanning national healthcare innovation and a life story marked by resilience and clarity, she embodies the term “old soul”—not just in wisdom, but in all she’s managed to accomplish in such a short time.

Raised in Massachusetts, Rebecca grew up with her parents, Tom and Stella, and her older sister Sarah, who has always been one of her closest companions and greatest sources of support. The sisters were tight-knit, even as Sarah’s softball schedule meant long weekend road trips. Rebecca, fiercely independent, would tag along with a chair, books, and friendship bracelets, setting up shop far from the sun and crowd to read alone in the shade.

She was driven from the start—she made her own breakfast and got herself on the bus, and later, juggled sports like dance and softball while excelling academically. School was her happy place. “I was very into school, and I didn’t want cancer to take that away from me.”

Her journey with cancer began quietly, and tragically, with a misdiagnosis. At ten years old, after a dance class stunt, she discovered a lump in her neck. Over two years and countless rounds of antibiotics, doctors continued to dismiss it as strep throat. But the tumor grew visibly, protruding from her neck, and she began to get sick more frequently. It wasn’t until a family vacation when she was 13 that things escalated. Vomiting and in pain, her mom insisted on seeing a specialist. That’s when they were finally referred to Boston Children’s Hospital, where a long-overdue surgery revealed a rare adult cancer in a child’s body: carcinoma of the salivary and parotid gland.

“I had to be part of cancer before I even knew what cancer was,” Rebecca recalls. “It wasn’t just the diagnosis—it was years of being ignored, passed around, and told I was fine.”

What followed was intense: major surgery, facial paralysis, and over 35 rounds of radiation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Every day for nearly seven weeks, Rebecca and her mom would leave school at 10 a.m., zip through Boston traffic, and head to the hospital basement for treatment. “I didn’t want to miss school,” she says. “I mapped it all out—if we left by 10:20, parked with our valet friend Thomas, and they got the coordinates [targeting the tumor with radiation] right, I could make it back by lunch.”

To most of her peers, Rebecca was a healthy, happy kid. She didn’t talk about cancer. She didn’t want pity. But at home, her family was carrying a heavy emotional load. “As a kid, I didn’t see their pain. I thought they were okay. It wasn’t until years later that I learned how much they were holding in to stay strong for me.”

Rebecca eventually went into remission—only to relapse just before her senior year. “I didn’t even tell my parents at first. I wasn’t afraid for me—I just didn’t want it to crush them.”

Through it all, she stayed focused on her goals, facing all obstacles—cancer, a global pandemic, college admissions, tearing her ACL while skiing—with a rare kind of resilience. “It really stripped me of the idea that my worth was in what I could do physically. It taught me how to love people better. To be there for others.”

That commitment to healing—mind, body, and spirit—is what led her to integrative therapies. “Radiation fatigue is real, and I needed relief,” she says. “We started with acupuncture. I began eating better. My whole family did. My dad was ozonating* grapes. We just wanted to do anything that might help.”

But the traditional medical system often made things harder. “I remember one day we tried to go to the [in-hospital integrative therapies center] for acupuncture,” Rebecca says. “We were early, but because I was a kid with an adult cancer, they sent us away to get ‘escorted’ back by a [hospital] rep. By the time we came back, we were seven minutes late and they turned us away again.” That day, she and her mom broke down in the hospital hallway.

That’s when Lucy’s Love Bus stepped in.

Her child life specialist introduced her to the nonprofit, and for the first time in her medical journey, Rebecca felt seen—not as a diagnosis, but as a child who needed comfort. “There was no long intake process. No proving myself. Just love. Agape love—the kind that’s not transactional, but unconditional.”

Lucy's Love Bus connected her with integrative therapies close to home: acupuncture for dry mouth and facial paralysis, support for stress and sleep, and, more than anything, relief. “It was like this: imagine your hand is in boiling water. And someone gives you permission to lift it out—for just an hour. You’re still burned. You’re still hurting. But you can finally breathe again.”

Years later, she returned to Lucy’s Love Bus to co-lead a coding project for other kids with cancer. That moment came full circle this past spring when she was the keynote speaker at the Butterfly Benefit. Then last month, June 2025,  Rebecca was unanimously voted onto Lucy’s Love Bus’ Board of Directors.

Today, she’s the Chief Business Officer at G19 Studios, leading national healthcare initiatives in AI and data strategy. But her heart remains deeply rooted in her lived experience. “I wouldn’t be in this position in any way, shape, or form without going through the healthcare system as a patient. It’s been the throughline of my life—even when I didn’t want it to be.”

Rebecca now uses her voice to advocate for children still in the thick of it—those who, like her, deserve more than just treatment. They deserve joy. Dignity. Hope.

“Lucy’s Love Bus gave me the space to exhale,” she says. “They reminded me that healing isn’t just about killing the cancer—it’s about making life livable while you fight. And that can change everything.”

Thank you for your generous gifts, which bring breath, hope, and healing to young people like Rebecca and their families!
 

* Ozonation is the process of introducing ozone gas (O3) into a substance to purify and disinfect it.