Spark Spotlight Teen: Cancer Survivor Charly Davis, Warming Heads and Hearts
By Meg Hale Brunton
Eighteen-year-old Asheville resident Charly Davis was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was just fifteen. Her first brain tumor was discovered after an ophthalmologist found an uncommon amount of fluid behind Charly’s optic nerve during a routine eye exam, and recommended she get an MRI. Since then, Charly has had two more medulloblastomas that have started her down a difficult path and changed her life. How does a teenager cope with so many challenges so early in life? Charly knits hats for other kids who are suffering from cancer, and she relies a lot on her dark sense of humor.
Prior to her diagnosis, Charly was a pretty typical kid. She spent eleven years training in multiple forms of dancing, including tap, jazz and ballet. Her favorite subject in school was science, particularly the hands-on forms of science where she got to make things explode. Just after her fifteenth birthday, Charly started experiencing some weird symptoms. She lost weight, started losing her balance, got awful headaches, and had blurry and double vision. She also started having extremely loud belches, which she referred to as ‘trucker burps.’
An MRI revealed a tumor on Charly’s cerebellum, blocking fluid pools to her brain. On October 2, 2020, she had her first surgery at Duke Medical Center to remove the tumor. Charly says that her surgeon had to be painstakingly careful in the tumor’s removal because some of it was laying on her spinal cord, which could have rendered her blind, paralyzed, or even dead if it was cut. The tumor was tested and found to be cancerous. So, Charly and her family spent the next six weeks at a hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she received full cranial and spinal radiation. Because of her young age, Charly received proton radiation (rather than photon radiation) because it creates less scatter and less cell loss.
After completing the radiation and chemotherapy treatments, Charly’s energy was still incredibly low. It was discovered that the treatments had caused Charly to develop an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s Disease in which her thyroid gland works much slower than it should. Dealing with the disorder and the cancer, Charly says she sometimes finds it difficult to be self-sufficient. “It’s a lot harder to pick stuff up and carry stuff around,” Charly says. “It was upsetting because I’m the type of person that no one is allowed to do stuff for me.” Charly says she had to adjust, but worked hard to build herself back up over time. To speed up her thyroid, she will be on medication for the rest of her life.
On May 16, 2021, Charly was diagnosed with her second tumor. This one was two millimeters thick and located on the right front ventricle of her brain. Because removing it surgically would be too intrusive, her doctors opted to treat it with targeted photon radiation. “I had just started growing hair back and that got rid of it,” Charly says of the treatment. “I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m done, I’m shaving my head.’”
Charly’s third tumor was discovered on November 21, 2022. This one was seven millimeters and, unlike the others, grew on the outside of her brain next to an artery. It was removed surgically, but again, her surgeon had to be very precise since Charly could bleed to death if the artery was cut. After that, Charly’s diagnosis was deemed ‘recurrent,’ and she was put on a regular dose of an oral chemotherapy pill to prevent, or at least slow, the cancer re-growth. “They’ve never seen it happen before with this type of tumor,” Charly says of her diagnosis. Though Charly says she has worked with a great team of doctors, no one can tell her why she developed this unique type of cancer. “I’m kind of like the science project.”
In 2022, Charly went back to school to complete the requirements to graduate with her class. She had always kept up with her school work, despite her treatments. “School work was one of the ways that helped me not be stressed, that made me not think, ‘I have cancer,’” she says. Last August, after graduating from TC Roberson High School, Charly started as a college Freshman at UNC-Greensboro. “I was actually more prepared for college than anyone I went to school with. I knew what I wanted to do.” Charly plans to go into social work, and specialize in pediatric oncology. She looked into colleges with good social work programs, and narrowed her search to only include schools that were close to hospitals. UNCG is just an hour away from Duke Hospital.
So far, Charly says that college is going really well for her, but that on bad days she experiences survivor’s guilt, thinking of others (particularly young people) with cancer who didn’t get the care that she did. “In my case, it’s the question of ‘Why did I live? Why am I here?’ It’s a lot to get out of your head.” Charly says, recalling that with her first tumor, she did laundry to keep her mind off of it. Then, she got into making rubber band bracelets. After a family friend gave her a knitting loom for Christmas, Charly began knitting hats to donate to cancer centers for the kids with cancer. “I make sure people who don’t have hair have a nice hat to wear,” she says. Since January, Charly has made over 300 hats, and even created her own Instagram account for them with the hashtag #NoColdHeadLeftBehind.
Charly has also found her dark sense of humor to be a means of relieving some of her tension, joking that she only has a quarter of a brain. She has also named her tumors: B.O.B (Blob of Brain), Marvin (after a character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and Indie (Indiana Jones). “If you sit and joke, and make fun of it, it helps a lot,” Charly says of cancer. “If you have it and you’re with someone who’s OK to joke about it, dark humor is just about the best way to deal with stress.”
As a pediatric oncology-focused social worker, Charly will use her experiences to help other kids with cancer find some normalcy in their lives by working to improve their emotional well-being. “It’s because of all the people I’ve met and because I want to give back in a way, and help kids that are going through what I am,” Charly says of her decision to go into social work. She hopes that, through her work, she can help children (as well as their parents) understand what they are going through and adopt a positive outlook. “Don’t focus on [cancer]; focus on the next thing. Focus on tomorrow.”