Erica Isenberg thought it was just stress.

A recent graduate of Sheffield Area High School, she was in the middle of finals week.

She was 19 years of age, and getting ready to finish up the classroom portion of her Practical Nursing program with Venango Tech before heading into clinicals in Tidioute.

Isenberg said she’d always somaticized stress, taking anxiety and converting it into stomach aches. So sitting through her final exam, she figured it was just another stomach ache.

“You know how your stomach gurgles,” said Isenberg, “but it was different. It was 10 times worse.”

She’d also been noticing bruises popping up on her legs for a couple of days prior to that day last November. But she’d just taken a whole week off for the flu.

“You probably are just low in iron,” Isenberg said a friend told her. But on that day –10 days after her 19th birthday, Isenberg wound up in the hospital.

Having a nursing background was both a blessing and a curse. The nurse who’d drawn her blood, “couldn’t even tell me herself,” said Isenberg

“She said she had to get the doctor to come in to tell me what was wrong. When he said the word Leukocytes, I knew. I started crying.”

Isenberg said her mom was strong, immediately telling Erica, “we’ve got this. It’s going to be fine.”

Isenberg’s father struggled a little more. She said her paternal grandfather had died of cancer at the early age of 40, when her father was still in high school. And, although there’s no blood-related cancers that run in her family, breast cancer and others have affected them.

“It was just hard (for him),” Isenberg said. “His dad died of cancer and now his daughter gets this diagnosis.”

Isenberg was diagnosed with Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia (APL), which is a rare form of leukemia. When it was first described in 1957, prognoses were typically one week to live. Today, 10-year survival rates are estimated at around 70 percent. Still, it’s not a form of leukemia that the Warren Cancer Center had ever dealt with. Neither had they ever had to administer Trisenox, which is the chemotherapy that Isenberg’s been receiving for the past eight months. She said she was sent from Warren General directly to Pittsburgh.

“I got there at 1:30 in the morning,” said Isenberg, and by 8 a.m. she’d had a blood transfusion as well as plasma and platelets.

“They told me I had basically no platelets when I got to Pittsburgh,” said Isenberg, heading to a septic shock that she wouldn’t have survived if it had gone untreated much longer.

Although the past eight months haven’t been “quite as bad” as Isenberg said she expected, she did say that it was difficult emotionally. She’d been very much looking forward to getting hands-on in the medical field as a nurse. Now, she said she’s ready for a break from medical.

Isenberg has decided to start studying at Pitt-Bradford this fall, setting a new course in pursuing a degree in Interdisciplinary Arts. She’d like to get into theater stage work and lighting.

“If I ever want to go back to becoming an LPN,” said Isenberg, “I can do that. But, for now, I think I’m ready for something different.”

Who can blame her?

While her diagnosis and healing are serious business, Isenberg prefers to focus on the sunny side of everything.

“If I were to be serious about it,” said Isenberg, “I’d be done. I like to make jokes. I like to make light of it. As long as I’m joking about myself.”

It just helps her get through it.

She and her siblings seek out any opportunity to turn the potential tragedy of her story into humor. Being too serious, said Isenberg, “it would change me.”

Isenberg also said that she’s had her own strength illuminated for her.

“People are stronger than they think,” Isenberg said, adding that you never really know what you’re capable of handling until you have no choice but to handle it.

That, as well as the fact that “there’s always someone who has it worse,” she said, have been her lessons throughout the past eight months.

“The night I got to Pittsburgh,” said Erica, “there was a call about a little girl that was being flown in and I watched her helicopter come in to the hospital, and I felt so bad for her. Someone always has it worse.”

Isenberg will be getting word from her doctor on July 27 as to whether or not she needs to continue treatment. While she said she is hopeful that she won’t need to have any more chemo, she also realizes that if she does need to continue treatments it’s not the worst thing in the world.