Heart of a fighter

Guard Quynne Huggins of the UTRGV Women’s Basketball Team knows a thing or two about being victorious on the basketball court, but her biggest victory came from within as she battled thyroid cancer. 

Huggins, a multidisciplinary studies senior, is no stranger to the new things that life has thrown her way. Back when she was younger, Huggins used to move around a lot within Arizona, from Phoenix to Peoria to Buckeye, because her father served in the military.

She attended a private school from kindergarten to fourth grade, and moved to Buckeye for fourth through eighth grades. Huggins attended one high school for her freshman and sophomore years, and then moved to another school her junior and senior years.

During her freshman year of college, she played basketball at Utah Valley University, but was released from the program for an unknown reason. Huggins did not want to stop playing, so she decided to move back to Arizona to play a year at Mesa Community College.

After finishing her year in community college, Huggins signed to play at UTRGV beginning in Fall 2017, but things were about to get complicated for her that summer.

Toward the end of May, Huggins said she started feeling exhausted even after just waking up; she felt like she had just finished playing a game. Huggins did not think much of it and neither did her mom because usually that’s how Huggins felt on a day-to-day basis.

The red flag for the family began when Huggins expressed unusual symptoms. She said that taking showers became different compared to before.

“Whenever I was taking showers, I would get really, really lightheaded,” Huggins said. “It got to the point where, like, I couldn’t really make it through a whole shower without feeling like I was going to pass out. So, my mom would have to be with me in the bathroom, with me just in case, and then it got to the point where I would get out and then I would pass out.”

Huggins also noticed that she was not only having issues in the shower, but also a change in her body. She started losing weight even after an increase in appetite.

That was when her mom, Valyncia Huggins, knew that her daughter’s symptoms were not normal and decided to take her to the doctor.

Several tests were done, but nothing seemed to be showing up on the results. Huggins thought it was something with blood sugar or hypoglycemia, but when the final set of results were given in mid-June, they stated it was thyroid cancer.

Thyroid cancer is not unusual in the Huggins family. Both Huggins’ mother and her mother’s cousin previously had thyroid cancer.

From then on, Huggins and her family started exploring options. She wanted a speedy treatment because she had already signed with UTRGV and wanted to be able to play in the fall, which now seemed impossible.

Huggins decided that radioactive treatment would be the best for her. For a week, she remained in quarantine at her home. Huggins could not leave her room and her family could not be near her.

Her meals were left outside of her bedroom in disposable plates. Huggins said being quarantined was not too bad, it was just the fact that she really couldn’t leave her room unless her family had gone upstairs for the night.

“Whenever they were gone, I could come out but anything I touched, say if I was sweating, anything I touched, they couldn’t touch because they could get what I was having,” Huggins said. “Everything had to be touched in like gloves or bags or like plastic plates, anything that could just be thrown away.”

Even though times were tough for Huggins, she said she did enjoy one thing, which was watching Netflix and eating all the candy she wanted.

“I also had an excuse to eat candy all day because the side effects of the radiation are that I don’t have the saliva, so I was able to eat sour candy all week and [my mother] couldn’t tell me I can’t because the doctor said I had to.”

There was only one downfall to the treatment: It would take six to 12 months to see whether it was working or not, but Huggins needed to be at UTRGV by August 2017.     

During the process, Huggins said she felt scared, not because of the cancer, but because of the fear of not being able to play basketball.

“It caught me off guard, I just really didn’t know how to react because it wasn’t anything that I could control,” she said. “It was just a bunch of, ‘OK, you make this choice. Now, let’s just wait and see.’ I couldn’t speed anything up, like medically I couldn’t speed anything up. I wasn’t allowed to really work out and actually help myself prepare to be here.

“I really was just frustrated, just scared that I probably would’ve had to redshirt, so then I had to sit out another year, basically. It was just overwhelming  ’cause I had so many feelings. I was feeling just not knowing if I wanted to quit. [At] one point, I wanted to quit and just not even worry about basketball anymore.”

During the weak moments and the hard thoughts, one of Huggins’ biggest supporters was her mother. When Huggins wanted to quit playing basketball, her mother encouraged her not to stop and keep going.

Huggins said her mother helped her out a lot, especially when so many things were showing her that she shouldn’t play.

“I don’t think I’d be here without her because she was always the one that was like my backbone,” she said. “She was the one that told me if any point in time if I ever had any self-doubt, she would be the one to tell me ‘Well, hey, you gotta stop thinking like that. You can’t think like that because you’re not supposed to be here doing this, thinking like that. You’re supposed to do everything else. Even if I tell you you can’t do something, you don’t listen to me.’

“She said, ‘I would never tell you that in the first place, but that’s the kind of mindset you need to have with anything that you’re doing.’”

Some might call it a miracle and others might call it fate, but the treatment showed results in two months. A week before Huggins was scheduled to drive to UTRGV, she was cleared to be on hormone medication.

Today, Huggins said she is past that stage in her life and this is a big year for her because she no longer has catching up to do.

She said she is currently on no treatment, except her hormone pill.

“No, not really treatment. I think every so often I will go to the doctor and get bloodwork done to make sure the dose of medicine I’m on is OK, nothing elevated or dropped or anything,” Huggins said.

Huggins’ advice to anyone fighting their own battle is to not give up.

 “Like what my momma said, ‘No, don’t listen to anybody, even if it’s your own family that tells you you can’t.’ You shouldn’t listen to them, you know, hard times do not stay forever at all. You know, there’s always … a light at the end of the tunnel.”