She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He had leukemia. They fell in love.
Lauren Aslanian was a 15-year-old sophomore at Sonora High — a strong soccer player — when she felt the lump on her throat. Nick Meza was 17, a senior at Fullerton High — a visual artist — when he noticed his swollen neck.
About 10 years ago, cancer diagnoses derailed their adolescent lives. But the darkest of times led them to each other. As they overcame blood cancers, their bodies, and their feelings for one another, strengthened.
Today, their cancers are in remission and their lives are intertwined.
The Thursday before Christmas, Meza, now 28, proposed to Aslanian, 26, in room 539 of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County — in the same cancer ward where they met as teenagers.
“I wanted to do the proposal where our journey started,” Meza said. “This is where we met.”
But, CHOC isn’t where they fell in love.
“It was two years from the first time we met until the time we got in a relationship,” Meza said. “We were just sick. We weren’t exactly focused on finding love.”
Except that was only half true.
They met around June 2014. The film, “The Fault In Our Stars,” had just come out. In it, a 16-year-old girl with cancer meets her 17-year-old crush in a support group.
Aslanian and other teenage girls at CHOC were infatuated with the movie for obvious reasons.
After watching the movie, her friend Christine, another cancer patient, said she had fallen in love with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy down the hall on the fifth floor. They went looking for his room.
“I’m 15, and she was 14,” Aslanian said. “We’re doing teenage girl things, like walking around and knocking on all the doors in the unit looking for this boy.”
A nurse directed them to Nick’s room. It wasn’t love at first sight.
“She didn’t describe him as having blonde hair or blue eyes, so we were like, ‘That doesn’t really sound like him. But, sure. Let’s give it a shot,’” Aslanian recalls. “So we knocked on the door and said, ‘Hey.’ Chrstine was like, ‘That’s not the guy.’”
“But, it was Nick and his mom,” Aslanian recalls. “And Christine’s mom and Nick’s mom are both Bulgarian. So, long story short, everyone started talking to each other in Bulgarian except for me. I had no idea what was going on, but that was kind of the icebreaker, how we all kind of got to know each other.”
Aslanian was discharged from the hospital shortly afterward. She and Meza didn’t stay in touch.
“After that first encounter, we exchanged phone numbers but didn’t keep in contact or see each other again,” Meza said.
“Until the AYA event at the Block,” Aslanian added.
AYA is the Adolescent and Young Adult cancer program at CHOC and the Block is now The Outlets at Orange.
When a teen or young adult is diagnosed with a pediatric type of cancer at CHOC, they get treatment from two types of oncology experts: one who specializes in their type of cancer and one who specializes in the needs of adolescents and young adults.
That second person is often called a child life specialist.
“They come around and make a child’s life better,” Aslanian said. “They bring you games and talk to you. Sort of like a social worker. They’re just someone you can hang out with and talk to about being in the hospital. And help you forget that you’re in the hospital.”
In the cases of Aslanian and Meza, that child life specialist was Kara Noskoff.
Around the time they were admitted, Noskoff was innovating one of the only child life programs in the country specially geared toward teens with cancer.
In addition to getting to know patients in the hospital, Noskoff envisioned a social program for adolescent cancer patients to get to know each other outside of CHOC. She created a social calendar replete with weekly activities from movie nights to art classes to an annual holiday party and oncology prom.
“When a cancer diagnosis interrupts adolescence or young adulthood, a time when most are focused on school, social activities, college and planning for the future, the risk for depression is high and can interfere with treatment,” Noskoff said in a previous interview with CHOC about the program. “Our goal is to reduce the risks of depression and feelings of isolation, and focus on important issues outside of illness. We want our patients to not only survive, but to thrive.”
To this day, Aslanian and Meza remain involved with AYA. They serve as mentors to younger patients and help to shape the future of the support network. Meza proposed to Alsanian at an AYA holiday event.
Noskoff played a key role in the proposal, shepherding Aslanian away from the AYA event to the fifth floor on the premise of her needing to meet a young cancer patient in Room 539 who — like Aslanian — aspired to become a nurse.
There was no such patient. When Aslanian opened the door to Room 539, she found Meza on one knee with a ring in his hand.
The ring is one of a kind: a marquise cut diamond set on a band custom-designed by Meza.
The band looks like two strands of DNA coming together, and it’s exactly 2.3 millimeters wide, representing the 23 pairs of chromosomes normally found in DNA.
“When you have cancer, your DNA is mutated,” Meza said. “There are some issues with it. So at the bottom of the ring, there’s a separation between the strands of DNA, and this represents the mutation in our DNA and our cancer. And, in that mutation, I inlaid the coordinates to CHOC where we met and added an orange stone, which represents the ribbon color for leukemia, and a green stone, which represents the ribbon color for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
Long before the proposal, the event at the Block was one of the first AYA social events. Only a handful of kids went, Meza recalled. One of them was Aslanian.
At the time, a boy at Sonora High School had a crush on her. She said she was annoyed by his incessant texts.
“Don’t worry,” Meza said. “I will take care of this.”
He took her phone and snapped a selfie of the two of them together, sending it to the other guy.
“Hey, bro, this is Nick,” he wrote. “Chill out. I’m talking to her.”
“At that point, it was just kind of like a cop-out for this guy to stop talking to me, but then something happened,” Aslanian recalled.
They started dating. On their first date, they went to see “Deadpool.”
They didn’t talk about cancer.
“We just talked about, I don’t know, like first date stuff,” Meza said. For instance, they bonded over their mutual interests in Marvel movies.
“He was my first boyfriend,” Aslanian said.
“She was my first girlfriend,” Meza added.
Their relationship became a slow burn. After Meza finished coursework at Fullerton College, he moved to Prescott, Arizona, to study at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Then, he moved to Seattle to work for Boeing.
Aslanian studied health science at Cal State Fullerton and then completed nursing school at Duke University in North Carolina. Now, she’s a bone marrow transplant nurse at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
They’ve lived apart for most of their relationship. That’s finally about to change. Meza accepted an engineering job with the City of Los Angeles, and the two of them will live together in La Habra starting in the new year.
“We’ve grown up both separately but together,” Aslanian said. ” I think that’s really important, and why we were able to stay together for such a long time. We were understanding of each other’s individual goals and able to come back to our common goal — each other.”
