Page 26 - BusinessWest May 11, 2026

Maddy Gray
Despite a Cancer Diagnosis, She Refused to Let the Dream Die
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
Maddy Gray decided to attend the nurse-pinning ceremony at Holy-
oke Community College a year ago. She described it as an attempt
at finding some type of closure.
She should have been up on the stage getting her pin, but instead, she
was in the audience looking up at her classmates and coping with a sea
of emotions resulting from a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatment
that left her firm of the opinion that her decade-long dream of becoming a
nurse had come to a bitter end one semester short of the finish line.
“At that point, I was so sure, so positive that this job wasn’t for me
anymore,” said Gray, who told BusinessWest that it was a big hug from
Johanna Kassidi, one of her professors, that night and her simple com-
ment, ‘I hope that you’re coming back in the spring — we need more nurs-
es like you in this field,’ that made her think that maybe, just maybe, the
dream wasn’t dead after all.
Fast-forwarding through six months of chemotherapy, an eventual
diagnosis that she was in remission, and that last semester at school,
Gray will be back for another nurse-pinning ceremony in a few weeks,
and this time she will be on stage, dealing with a completely different set
of emotions that could not have been imagined a year ago.
When her name is called, it will mark the climactic end to a truly
remarkable story of perseverance that began almost a decade before it
was confirmed that she had cancer and, actually, long before that, when
this foster child who was abandoned by her mother while her father was
serving a life’s sentence, fought an ongoing battle with thoughts that she
couldn’t achieve the goals that most others take for granted.
Gray spent many years not really knowing what to do with her life.
Fighting through the stigma of foster childhood, she obtained her GED
“At that point, I
was so sure, so
positive that this
job wasn’t for me
anymore.”
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MAY 11, 2026
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