For years, Abby Bray hid her cancer story. Now she's using it to fight for others

It's a painful reality that's stretched on for years: shortages of critical cancer drugs threatening the lives of patients.

Now, we're bringing you the extraordinary story of a young girl who battled cancer and those shortages and is talking about it for the first time.

At 16, Abby Bray has the sort of future that is beginning to fill up quickly.

There is high school and a demanding academic program. Competitive swimming. Friends. Soon, there will be college applications and decisions about what comes next.

And there is something else now: time.

This year, Abby reached five years since ringing the bell that marked the end of her cancer. She is officially considered cured.

“I think it's looking pretty bright,” Abby said of her future. “Next year we're going to start talking about colleges and right now it's school. I have a great group of friends inside and outside of school.”

It is an ordinary answer from a 16-year-old who has had to think about decidedly unordinary things.

Abby was diagnosed with leukemia just after her ninth birthday. Treatment would consume the next two and a half years of her childhood.

She remembers being told she had cancer. She remembers being told how long treatment would last.

Neither made her cry.

“But it did get me when they told me that I would lose my hair,” Abby said.

What she remembers losing, though, was bigger than that.

There was school, where she was increasingly absent. Swimming, which she had to stop. And friendships that seemed to keep moving even when Abby couldn't.

“I wasn't going to school very much and it felt like my friends had moved on,” she recalled.

Early in treatment, someone offered Abby a program called “Monkey in My Chair.” A large stuffed monkey would sit at her desk on the days she couldn't be there — a placeholder for a child with cancer.

“I scoffed at it,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is stupid. Who would ever want that?’”

Then she began to understand.

“I did ask for it just to sit in my chair so that they wouldn't forget,” Abby said. “Abby would be here too if she wasn't sick.”

For a nine-year-old, it was a fear stripped to its simplest form: Life was happening somewhere else, and she wanted to know there was still a place for her in it.

Years later, Abby would find herself on the opposite side of being seen.

The little girl who once worried people would forget her grew into a teenager hoping they would never know.

Talking about cancer became so uncomfortable, Abby said, that it could bring her close to a panic attack. What began as pain eventually became something she has only recently been able to say out loud.

Shame.

“It wasn't, ‘I'm proud to be a survivor,’” Abby said. “It was like, ‘I hope they don't find out.’”

She changed schools. Almost no one there knew.

And there was one part of her cancer story she couldn't entirely leave behind: the scar from the port used during her treatment.

“Until last year, I was ashamed to show my port scar,” she said. “I wouldn't want to wear a shirt or a dress that would show it.”

For a competitive swimmer, hiding it was especially difficult.

The scar didn't change. Abby did.

“I kind of just grew to realize that nobody else notices it. It only bothers me,” she said. “And if I did point it out, they wouldn't judge me for it.”

Today, Abby is back in the pool.

And the history she once worked so hard to keep other people from discovering is now something she has decided to share.

Her interview with Spotlight on America marks the first time Abby has publicly told the full story of her cancer journey. Sitting beside her was her mother, Laura Bray, who discovered there were parts of that story she had never heard either.

“It's both heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time,” Laura said. “I'm immensely proud of her bravery and courage to speak those words of some of the hardest times in anyone's life, but a child's life, out loud.”

Laura said the silence was never something she tried to break for her daughter. For nearly seven years, as the work born from Abby's illness grew far beyond their family, she waited.

That timing matters because Abby is no longer simply telling the story.

She's beginning to use it.

During her treatment, multiple cancer drugs Abby needed were in shortage. Laura began searching for them. Other mothers joined her.

What started as a group trying to help one sick child became Abby's Angels.

“It started with me and with my mom trying to help me,” Abby said. “It didn't start out as Angels for Change. It started out as Abby's Angels.”

Abby's Angels eventually became Angels for Change, the nonprofit Laura Bray founded to help patients and hospitals navigate drug shortages and find medicines that can be extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

As we've reported for years, ongoing drug shortages, some that can go on for years, have interrupted treatments, destroyed clinical trials and led to patient deaths.

Nearly seven years later, the organization still has a name for the girl at the beginning of it all.

Patient one.

“Patient one was Abby,” Laura said. “And if I'm not willing to do for patient 800,000 of what I did for patient one, then we're missing the mark.”

Now patient one has joined the work herself.

Abby serves as youth advocacy chair for Angels for Change, lending the organization something no adult — including her mother — can quite replicate: the voice of the child who lived the crisis that helped create it.

Yet there are hints that advocacy might have found Abby even if cancer hadn't.

Years ago, a school assignment asked what she wanted to do when she grew up. Abby's answer was remarkably specific: Start a nonprofit working to fight injustice.

She tells a story about being so young she could barely talk, yet confronting another child who was preventing a little girl from going down a playground slide.

By eighth grade, Abby had earned a school award for being kind, fighting injustice and standing up for others.

The award is still on her shelf.

Now the stakes are considerably higher.

She is speaking for patients she may never meet, including children waiting for medicines they cannot afford to wait for.

And during our conversation, a thread emerged between the child Abby was and the advocate she is becoming — one Abby said she had never considered before.

At nine, she wanted a stuffed monkey in an empty classroom chair because she needed to know she hadn't been forgotten.

Now she is working to make sure other patients aren't.

“I never thought of it like that,” Abby said. “But I do think that making sure that not only me, but everybody else is remembered.”

Her mind went immediately to the places cancer had taken her from.

“The chair in school where they'd be learning and swim practice where I had to stop swimming because of my port and just from how much it hurt,” she said.

Then she landed somewhere larger.

“Everybody should be remembered.”

For years, Abby wanted distance from the part of her life that started all of this.

Now, she's found a place for it.

Near the end of our interview, she turned to her mother.

“You don't like this when I say it, but I don't know who I would be without it,” Abby said.

“I know who you'd be without it,” Laura replied.

Abby persisted.

“I don't, because it was kind of a big moment in my life,” she said. “Nobody needs this kind of thing in their life, but it gave me a bigger empathy for people. It did. And I don't know if I would still have that without this.”

“It's true,” Laura said. “It gave it to me too.”

Click here to learn more about Angels for Change and the work Abby and Laura are doing to get critical drugs that are in short supply to the patients who need them most. And if you look closely at their logo, you'll see the "A" hidden in homage to Abby.

To join Abby and Laura and share your experience with drug shortages on Hill Day in 2027, reach out to Angels for Change through their website, where you can also find ways to help end drug shortages.

Spotlight on America's latest report, exploring how efforts to end drug shortages are getting stuck in regulatory red tape, can be watched below:

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