23-year-old Lake City Police officer finds out she has cancer

LAKE CITY, Fla. — An unexpected diagnosis is scary enough, but when you’re just 23 years old, it can feel like the end of the world.

Lake City Police Officer Taylor Sapp is fighting cancer, with her department rallying behind her every step of the way.

For the past three years, Sapp has been serving her community on the Lake City Police Department. The men and women she works alongside are family.

“I couldn’t ask for a better place to work or a better group of people to work with,” Sapp said. In late April, her life changed forever with a trip to the ER for severe pain in her ribs. “I thought it was a pulled muscle,” she recalled. Instead doctors found a 10 centimeter tumor. They told her she had lymphoma.

“No 23-year-old wants to hear, hey you have a tumor,” she added.

Cancer.net estimates 8,830 Americans will be diagnosed with Lymphoma this year, and of those, about a tenth -- or roughly 960 patients are estimated to die.

Sapp has a long road ahead of her with 17 weeks left of chemotherapy.

She wants others to listen to their bodies.

“If I wouldn’t have gone, I wouldn’t have found this, so I would say, listen to your body. I thought going to the emergency room was kind of dramatic, and now I have cancer,” Sapp said.

In the meantime, Sapp is holding out hope.

“My story isn’t the worst story out there, there’s so much worse going on right now,” she added.

She’s already looking forward to getting back on the streets.

“I’m gonna get through it, I’m going to go back and be a cop again,” Sapp said.

Cox Media Group