If Savannah Bay Strandin could go back and change her cancer diagnosis, she wouldn’t.
“I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t been diagnosed,” said Strandin, 27, who planned to move to New York after graduating from Western Illinois University and take the musical theater world by storm.
In the spring of 2018, after a year and a half as a professional actress, she started doing just that, preparing for production in Houston. Then she got body aches and an unusual tiredness. Because she had classic symptoms, doctors initially told her she had mononucleosis and that getting lots of rest was the best medicine.
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As she had hoped, the Guilford High School graduate was starting to feel better and ready to start the show. Then came a cough, which she tried to kick ahead of opening night. But it shouldn’t be. Her hacking continued and she was eventually replaced by an understudy.
Come to find out that Strandin didn’t suffer from mono at all. She had stage 4 lymphoma and almost immediately found herself in intensive care. The cancer quickly robbed her body of proteins, causing her to gain nearly 50 pounds of water weight in a matter of days.
“Protein helps fluid flow through you,” she said. “If the protein isn’t there, the liquid has nowhere to go. So everything went between my skin and my muscles. I didn’t recognize my own body.”
While undergoing intensive chemotherapy, Strandin needed help with things most people take for granted, like walking and going to the toilet. But after just five months, she received a very different diagnosis: the cancer was in remission.
Nine months later, she was cast in a production of “Singin’ in the Rain” at the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island, Illinois. It’s her full-time job again and she’s not looking back.
Strandin just finished a run as Belle in a production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in Circa ’21 and is starring in Disaster!, a 1970s film parody which opens July 22 and runs through September 10 runs.
“I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t do theater and I couldn’t perform,” she said.
Even before remission, she wasn’t preparing for life away from the stage. She never gave herself the opportunity to do anything else, even though in the back of her mind she knew it might have been.
“I just said, ‘Okay, I have to work hard and make an effort to get back to where I was,'” she said. “I feel like I was born for it. I love who I’ve become because of (cancer). i am a stronger person I’m a more grateful person and I’m just more grateful for life and all the ups and downs that come with it.”
Glendia Strandin recalls how the illness grew from subtle but frustrating symptoms into a storm of illness that brought with it all the uncertainty, fear and sometimes helplessness she feared her daughter would not be able to handle.
“I saw my daughter on her deathbed,” Glendia Strandin said. “But I’ve never seen anyone so positive. She was asleep when the doctor came in and gave us the diagnosis. I woke her up and she looked at me and said, ‘Mom, everything will be fine.’ She was like that all along.”
Today, Strandin lives in Davenport, Iowa, and is engaged to fellow actor Tristan Tapscott. The pair met during the production of Singin’ in the Rain and have performed together ever since.
“He was Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast,” she said. “In ‘Disaster!’ he plays my fiancé.”
Strandin and Tapscott are getting married in October.
Tickets for “Catastrophe!” can be reserved by calling 309-786-7733. The Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse is located at 828 3rd Ave., Rock Island, approximately 125 miles from Rockford.
Jim Hagerty covers general news, schools and courts. Contact him at 815-987-1345 [email protected] Twitter: @jiimagerty Facebook: /hagertyjim