Haley Hallgren Earns USMC/AVCA Battles Won Award

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LEXINGTON, Ky. – Haley Hallgren has earned the USMC/AVCA Battles Won Award, which recognizes volleyball players and coaches who are overcoming obstacles on and off the court. This is a new award in 2023 announced by the AVCA.

In September of 2021, doctors discovered Haley had a mass and determined it was a slow-developing form of lung cancer that had been growing for several years.

When did you find out you had lung cancer?

“I was diagnosed with lung cancer in the fall of 2021 a few months after arriving at Michigan, this after five years of misdiagnosis and clear chest X-rays. When I first got to Michigan I was diagnosed with pneumonia then, after about a week and a half, my chest X-ray was clear and I was cleared to return to volleyball. Almost a month and multiple doctor visits later, I still had an aggressive cough and strained the muscles between my ribs.”

“I went to the hospital and got the same X-ray I had two weeks before. They told me my lung completely collapsed due to a mass blocking my airway. They didn’t know what it was, so I was admitted, and they did a scope surgery to remove the mass and have it tested.”

“Two weeks later, I got the call… it was cancerous, and I’d likely had it for about five years. In January, I underwent surgery to remove the upper left lobe of my lung and part of the airway. I was extremely fortunate that I didn’t have to undergo chemotherapy and that the surgeon was willing to attempt my surgery laparoscopically so I could continue playing.”

When was it the most challenging and how are you doing now?

“When I was diagnosed it was a relief, because for the past five years, I had been living life exhausted, constantly sick, and had a slew of other symptoms that I had accepted as my new normal. It was comforting to know that I didn’t have to keep living that way. However, the following fall was difficult mentally because instead of having a problem and knowing that we were fixing it, I fell into a constant state of worrying that something was wrong, and I  didn’t know. I had another bout of pneumonia in the fall of 2022, but the clear scans were hard to accept as accurate because they had been wrong for years. I think it was just very difficult to move past the what ifs and constant…