USC teacher, student reunite at Messiah

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, native Sarah Dillon began graduate studies at the University of South Carolina (USC) in the fall of 2012. She worked as a graduate assistant in the Office of Student Engagement, supervised by Dottie Weigel. Little did the two women know that life—and a cancer diagnosis—would lead them both to Messiah College.

After completing her first semester of graduate school in the fall of 2012, Dillon was walking across the USC campus when she felt a sharp pain in her back. Out of breath, she made her way to a bench, thinking she had a pulled muscle. It was actually a collapsed lung.

“Dottie was the first one to the ambulance that day, and the first one next to me in the hospital,” said Dillon of her supervisor. “She stayed with me until my parents could get a flight from Pennsylvania. She never left my side.”

Through weeks of biopsies and scans, Dillon learned she has medullary carcinoma of the thyroid. She withdrew from USC and returned home to Pennsylvania in February of 2013. While under the care of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she eventually went to work at Lancaster Bible College as the assistant director of athletics. In the fall of 2015, she was ready to return to grad school, this time pursuing an M.A. in higher education at Messiah.

Then one year later, Weigel left USC to become Messiah’s director of the graduate program in higher education.

“The idea that I will finish my degree work under the leadership of Dottie gives me goose bumps,” said Dillon, who plans to graduate in May of 2017.

As for her prognosis? She lives symptom-free and has never undergone treatment. Doctors predict she has had the slow-growing cancer for 13 years now. If it hadn’t been for the collapsed lung, the cancer might have gone undetected.

“I am monitored a handful of times a year with lab work and scans,” said Dillon. “I never would have predicted the events of the past three years. We have goals and dreams, but we know that God’s hand is in all of this.”