In just a few weeks, William & Mary student Molly Atwater will walk across the stage at commencement with her master’s degree in computational operations research.
One month later, she will undergo surgery to have her colon removed.
For Atwater, the past year has been filled with medical procedures, graduate classes and a lot of ups and downs. Now she is looking forward to graduating and moving to Washington to begin a consulting job.
Atwater’s path to the College of William & Mary was marked by her family history. Her parents met at the college, and her father, Peter, is a professor in the economics department. Her younger brother is an undergraduate at the college.
When Atwater started college, she knew she wanted to be a math major. She said her dream major would have been one specializing in logic puzzles, but then she stumbled upon a fortuitous topic.
“I ended up doing some sleuthing on the math website, and I came across operations research,” Atwater said. “I was like ‘OK, I think I found what I was supposed to be doing.’”
As the summer before her senior year wound down, Atwater was ready for the best year of her college experience.
In the fall, she started training for a Spartan Race — a notoriously difficult terrain course — that she planned to run in Dallas with her fiancé, Thomas Pulisic, also a W&M graduate.
A week before the race, however, she awoke with a pain in her abdomen that she thought was caused by food poisoning. The pain marked the start of a process that she said has shaped her life more than anything else.
“I kept on getting worse and worse, and my mom came down to take me to the emergency room.” she said. “They did all sorts of scans and found a ton of inflammation in my large intestine.”
After an emergency colonoscopy, Atwater’s doctors diagnosed her with Crohn’s disease and started her on a regimen of steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs. However, she continued to get worse and ended up spending 13 days in the hospital.
Eventually, doctors decided that Atwater was not suffering from Crohn’s disease, with one doctor suggesting that she could be experiencing what is called runner’s colitis. Neither diagnosis provided Atwater any relief, and she went home the week before Thanksgiving, receiving incompletes in all of her fall courses.
As her condition worsened, Atwater visited Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, where tests revealed a 5½-foot section of her colon was blocked.
Just a few days before graduation, Atwater was told that she needed surgery.
She was scheduled for an ileostomy, in which a small opening is made in the abdominal wall and the end of the lowest part of the small intestine, the ileum, is brought through the opening to form a stoma. Waste is eliminated through the stoma and into a bag worn on the stomach.
After her surgery, Atwater decided she wanted to change the conversation about ostomies, creating the Instagram account @MollyOllyOstomy to share her experiences after her initial procedure.
“There is massive stigma out there about ostomies that you can’t wear cute clothes, that you are going to smell bad all the time, that only old people have them,” she said. “But I took a look down and there was Olly (her name for her ostomy), and we were in this together and we were going to make the best out of anything that came our way.”
Atwater talks her ostomy and her daily life on her Instagram account, which has gained more 7,000 followers. Atwater said she uses the account to show that young people have ostomies and to fight the stigma against ostomy patients.
“I get messages and comments from people all over the world, all ages, 12- year-olds, 80-year-olds, just sharing how my experiences have impacted them and given them a more positive outlook on life,” she said.
“I have always tried to take my experiences and not let them weigh me down,” she said. “I am a strong believer that life doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle, and I must have shown that I can handle a lot because this is something that would definitely break other people, but I am fortunate to have the willpower and the support system in place to tackle almost everything.”
