Story by Mary King
Photos by Elise Mahon
GO HEELS. GO HEELS. GO HEELS.
Printed in funky blue lettering, the UNC-Chapel Hill slogan runs up and down the T-shirt that Natalie Yehle, 20, is wearing as she recounts how she had wanted to be anything but a Tar Heel.
“My parents went here, my aunt went here, and my cousin lived here and worked here. And I was like, ‘I need to go do something different,’” the junior says as she walks across the campus where she’s studied for the past three years. “And the more I thought about it and went on an actual college campus tour in high school, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I kind of like it!””
In the distance, past the dorms and classrooms, are the lights of UNC’s medical campus: a frequent destination throughout her childhood.
Yehle remembers the trips from Raleigh to Chapel Hill as exciting days off from school. She and her parents would grab a bite at Pepper’s Pizza, her favorite restaurant on Franklin Street. With eateries shuffling in and out of business over the years, she says the barely-off-campus thoroughfare looks completely different nowadays. Pepper’s has become the hot dog joint Sup Dogs.
Before her checkup, Yehle would sit in the hospital waiting room and play games on a touch screen built into the floor. The staff would gush over her. After her appointment, she and her family would sit on the lawn beneath the trees at the campus’ upper quad.
“I was like, ‘OK, we’re here now,’” Yehle said. “‘I don’t really know where we are, but I’m having a good time.’”
Chapel Hill is home to some happy memories for her parents, too: They met at UNC their junior year and both went on to attend the School of Pharmacy.
But it’s also the place where they had to watch their daughter endure intense medical treatments that wiped out her immune system when she was 2 years old. The two pharmacists did their best not to let the toddler see how worried they were — “trying to keep that in the background so that she was as happy as possible,” Yehle’s mother, Tracy Yehle, says.
This is where Natalie Yehle’s memory gets fuzzy. Lots of needles puncturing her skin. A bandage across her back when she woke up after a spinal tap. A chemo port getting removed from her chest: “All right! One, two, three!”
“We had really good friends that would bring in toys — like back then, Polly Pockets were big,” Tracy Yehle says. “She probably had every possible Polly Pocket to play with.”
Natalie Yehle was treated in the pediatric hematology-oncology department of UNC Children’s. In November 2003, a month before her 3rd birthday, she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of cancer found in children.
“My body was creating mutant white blood cells that were killing me, basically,” Natalie Yehle says.
Once she went into remission at 5, her trips to Chapel Hill tapered off from once a week, to once every two weeks, to once every month and so on. Her head, bald from the chemo, sprouted with hair again.
“That’s when she got all those crazy curls,” Tracy Yehle says. “Her hair wasn’t nearly that curly before!”
Now, Natalie Yehle goes back to the hospital once a year to get bloodwork done.
“I go and sit in the room with a bunch of little kids,” she says.
Dr. Stuart Gold, a distinguished professor of pediatrics at UNC and the chief of the UNC Lineberger Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology, has been her hematologist-oncologist for the past 18 years.
“I emailed Dr. Gold when I got into Carolina,” she says. “I was like, ‘Guess what? I’m going to UNC!’ And he was like ‘Oh my gosh, congratulations!’”
Gold remembers young Natalie Yehle as an intelligent and easygoing toddler who took things in stride to an uncommon extent for her age.
“She went through treatment as a very young child very impressively, very personably, almost like an adult. Probably better than adult,” Gold says. “Because she was always mature beyond her years.”
At least 483,000 childhood cancer survivors are living in the U.S. as of 2018, according to the National Cancer Institute. Even in cases like Natalie’s in which they were too young to remember what they went through, they don’t necessarily come out unscathed. The medicines can still affect their brains — so, Gold says, it’s amazing how survivors like Natalie Yehle accomplish the things they do.
“She’s a wonderful young lady who has a very bright future, who’s incredibly good,” Gold says. “And so, part of me doesn’t even like stories like this because I don’t define her as a patient with leukemia. To me, she’s Natalie, who happened to have cancer when she was young. She’s absolutely normal.”
When someone brings up cancer, Natalie Yehle will mention she had it. But sometimes, she says, it makes things awkward. And the conversation grinds to a halt.
“They’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m so glad you’re here with us.’ And I’m like, ‘Please calm down!’” she says, laughing. “But yeah, I don’t try to hide it. But I also don’t be like, ‘Hey, I’m Natalie, I’m a cancer survivor.’”
Natalie Yehle says things really weren’t that bad for her. The cancer struck when she was very young, so she doesn’t remember much. It’s a common cancer, so there’s a lot of research surrounding its treatment. She lived close to a top cancer treatment facility. She never heard her parents stressed out about affording emergency room visits or medical bills or procedures.
“I just grew up like, if you have a problem, you go to the doctor, or if you’re in an emergency, you call 911 for an ambulance,” she says.
But when she was in middle school, her family moved to rural Lexington, North Carolina, a town with one small hospital. She says it was then that she realized how fortunate she was to have access to quality health care without needing to worry about the financial implications.
She was shocked when her classmates would talk about parents who were sick and couldn’t afford to go to the hospital, or people taking an Uber to the emergency room because ambulances cost too much.
“I want to give back because I went through so much and didn’t have to worry about the finances, and so many other people do,” she says. “And I think opening up access to quality health care is a huge concern in the United States, especially.”
An environmental science major, Natalie Yehle is interested in studying the interactions between the environment and human health: Some environmental factors are linked to cancer, for example. She wants to go into epidemiology — and no, not because we’re living through a pandemic right now.
“I wanted to do it before it was cool,” she says, laughing.
One of her inspirations is “Your local epidemiologist,” a Facebook page with more than 300,000 followers run by a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina aims to translate published studies about COVID-19 into more accessible language for the general public.
“That’s kind of what I want to do,” Natalie Yehle says.
Yehle works a few hours each week as a research assistant studying how pathogens affect carbon and nitrogen levels in grass. She and a postdoctoral student collect grass from a plot in Duke Forest.
“It’s kind of nerdy, but it’s fun,” she says.
Natalie Yehle points out the dirt under her fingernails. She had just come from working with plants at a community garden with the Marching Tar Heel Volunteers: a community service club within UNC’s marching band, where she plays the clarinet. Earlier that day, she’d driven to Greensboro Ice House for a figure skating lesson. (She started over quarantine not knowing how to skate; now she can turn and spin and jump. She hopes to compete eventually.) Next on the agenda is a meeting for Sigma Alpha Iota, her music sorority. On top of all of that, she’s a job coach for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“It doesn’t sound like much,” she says. “But every single thing I do takes up multiple hours, so it’s a lot.”
That’s what Tracy Yehle admires most about her daughter: her eclectic interests and her hunger to learn.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Maybe you need to slow down a little bit,’” she says. “But she gets antsy and wants to start doing more stuff and doesn’t like to just sit around and be idle too much.”
At UNC, it’s common for students to load up their schedules with extracurricular activities in an effort to appear well-rounded for resumes and graduate school applications.
But here and now, Natalie Yehle is just having a good time.
“I just do things that I’m interested in and not really things that go together,” she says. “They just kind of go together because I’m interested in them.”
