It was August 16, 2008, and Morgan Heflin was preparing to go out and celebrate several happy occasions. Her younger brother had just turned 11, she was approaching her own 17th birthday and was about to enter her senior year at Pasadena High School.

The teenager had a large to-do list. Filling out college applications, preparing for graduation, socializing with friends, going to football games and attending prom were just a few of her plans.

But after losing 25 pounds and finding a golf ball-sized lump on her neck that had ballooned quickly, the teenager, who suddenly became weak that night, grew concerned. Heflin was rushed to the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente in South Los Angeles. At the time, everything seemed routine: the nurse practitioner had just given her a physical examination and taken blood tests. Then, a doctor entered the room. “He told me he thought it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma at best, or at worse leukemia,” said Heflin.

An hour later, when the blood test results came back, his suspicions were confirmed. She had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the third most common cancer in children and young adults. Upon further examination, the physician found two cancerous growths in her chest and another in her armpit.

“I thought my life was pretty much over when they diagnosed me — I was angry at first,” said Heflin. “In the beginning when I was first diagnosed I was ignorant to cancer. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know anything about it. No one in my family has really ever had it. Immediately I thought cancer meant death, but after I spoke with my doctors and they told me my cure rate and how good of a prognosis I had, and the type of cancer I had. I knew I was going to make it, I never really thought about dying after that. … I declared victory over my disease from that moment.”

Heflin listened intently during consultations with her physician, then began doing online research and reading books about her condition. These steps, she said, helped her anticipate the symptoms and side effects, alerting her when something was out of the ordinary.

Despite a 90 percent survival rate — one that has risen dramatically since the 1960s, when it was slightly over 30 percent — the road ahead would not be easy. After several invasive procedures — a biopsy and the placement of a port catheter under her skin to administer chemotherapy and draw blood — she began an initial round of chemotherapy on Sept. 19.

“I would scratch a lot and my skin got discolored from it,” she said as she pulled up her sleeve, showing fingernail marks that have not faded. “The surgeries were really painful and I had a bad reaction to the anesthesia. I would wake up screaming.

“I tolerated my chemotherapy very well, I didn’t throw up a lot but toward the end of my treatment is when I had a lower tolerance and began to throw up,” Heflin added. “You know how you turn on a faucet and all the water runs out, it would be like that and it wouldn’t stop until my body was done.”

Her mother, who had begun taking courses needed to enter nursing school, gave her injections three times a day to stimulate white blood cell production, but she had an adverse reaction. The injections caused joint pain, so much so, that she had trouble holding onto things. In Heflin’s words, it has only been since March of last year that she has been able to open “a bottle of soda or anything by myself.”

As with many chemotherapy patients, she also experienced severe hair loss. She held onto her mane for as long as she could, putting what she did have into a small ponytail. But then “I would wake up and clumps would be on the pillow or I would take a shower and it would be in the drain.”

Opting for a shorter look, she cut it off into a miniature, curly afro. When that began to fall out, she shaved it off completely. During her very last chemotherapy treatment, in December, her eyebrows and eyelashes also fell out. “That was the worst part of the thing,” she said. “I could deal with feeling bad, but when you look in the mirror, it’s a constant reminder that you’re different from everybody else — that you’re sick, really sick.”

Despite the side effects, the treatment was a success — and at the beginning of 2009, Heflin was declared cancer-free. The coast is not clear, however. Last March, around the same time she began to regain her reflexes, she went in for emergency surgery to remove two lymph nodes from her chest and a CAT scan showed “hot spots” where doctors feared the cancer could return. As she spoke with the Wave during a hospital visit, two new lymph nodes were being monitored by her physician, Dr. Robert Cooper.

If the disease comes out of remission, “she will require more intensive chemotherapy than what she has received thus far,” said Cooper. “It is not just a difficult four-to-six months or year — this will change [her] life forever. There is a risk of reoccurrence, there is a risk of side effects from the chemotherapy and radiation. These are life-long risks. It is going to require life-long monitoring of her health. We know that people who have gone through chemotherapy are more likely to develop other complications and it will be even more important to have good health, to not smoke, not spend too much time in the sun without sunblock, to not become obese or do other things that contribute to poor health.”

Surprisingly, Heflin says she does not regret the experiences. Before falling ill, Heflin had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Besides volunteering at the clinic where she is being treated, Heflin — who has lived in West L.A. for the past year — is finishing her diploma through an independent study program at Santa Monica College, where she is expected to graduate this month and begin taking nursing courses in the fall. Her ultimate goal: to become a pediatric oncologist.

“I wonder sometimes, ‘What makes me different?’ said Heflin, who recently lost a close friend to a rare immune deficiency disorder. “In the clinic alone, over the last few months, four people have died. They weren’t as lucky as me … but I just have to believe that God has a greater purpose for me and not to say that he didn’t have a greater purpose for those who passed away. I don’t know how to explain it, I just have to be grateful and thankful every day that I wake up and have empathy and compassion for those that have lost their kids. … All I can do is give back.”