When Carter Soderberg, GSB ’28, received his cancer diagnosis, the doctors assured him that his illness was “curable cancer,” saying he had a 90% survivability rate. But what followed was anything but simple.

For the sophomore, the past year has been defined by long hospital stays, relentless chemotherapy and an unwavering determination to return to campus.

“Believe it or not, chemo sucks!” Soderberg wrote in a January update to friends and family. “These days are rough, I don’t see any use in lying about it … But you know I have to get through it.”

His treatment regimen often meant five straight days of six-hour infusions, leaving him exhausted and immunocompromised. Yet even while confined to infusion rooms, he found ways to stay himself, bringing his pillows, electric blanket and, most importantly, his mighty sense of humor.

The months were scarred by moments of hope and heartbreak. Scans early this year showed his lung tumor had “slightly decreased” and no new nodules had formed, but doctors discovered “two new nodules on [his] liver that are ‘concerning for metastatic disease.’”

Soderberg met the news with courage. As his mother, Christina Soderberg, recalled, after hearing a grim prognosis at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the top cancer hospital in the United States, Soderberg looked the doctor in the eye and said, “I’ll take those tiny odds and be your success story.”

That perseverance carried him to Indiana University’s Simon Cancer Center, where Dr. Larry Einhorn — best known for treating cyclist Lance Armstrong — saw progress where others had not.

“That, he said, is not failure, it’s progress,” Christina wrote, pointing to Soderberg’s dramatically lowered tumor markers. 

By late May, Soderberg endured a grueling seven-hour surgery that removed a massive abdominal tumor and part of his liver. Surgeons described his tumor as largely scar tissue, evidence that chemotherapy had worked.

Through it all, Soderberg leaned on faith, family and community. “Please know, the love coming my way is seriously the way that I am able to keep as positive as I am,” he wrote in January.

Friends shaved their heads in solidarity, his Fordham Mock Trial teammates sent care packages and his younger sister shared emotional tributes after his surgery.

“He is the very definition of grace under pressure,” his sister Macy Soderberg wrote. “Carter is our hero, resilient, wise beyond his years and strong in a way that feels touched by something divine.”

Now, Soderberg has returned to Rose Hill. Fully enrolled once again, he’s back living with his five roommates and serving as a senator for the Gabelli School of Business in the United Student Government.

Soderberg has also rejoined Fordham’s Mock Trial Club, picking up where he left off before his treatment.

His path has been marked by pain, perseverance and refusal to give up on the future he imagined for himself. “Soon enough I’ll be walking, surrounded by friends, into my timely graduation where all of this will be nothing more than a blip in the past,” he said.

For Carter Soderberg, the fight continues, and so does the life he refused to let cancer take away.