Metro Atlanta cancer survivor establishing nonprofit to help others discover identity after treatment

As Blood Cancer Awareness Month ends this week, a metro Atlanta graduate student and blood cancer survivor is using his story to help others discover themselves beyond treatment.

In 2022, Owen Abeles was just a few months into his freshman year at Oxford College of Emory University when he was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin Lymphoma.

During that time, Abeles was put in a quarantine house and couldn't go to the dining hall for his meals. That's when he began to discover his love for cooking.

"It was like by force," Abeles said. "I started cooking more often, but then I ended up finding it's a meditative exercise for me. It's a place where I can kind of reset."

Rather than returning home to New Jersey, Abeles chose to continue his classes while undergoing chemotherapy for six months at Piedmont Newton in Covington.

While navigating freshman year and chemotherapy, cooking became a stress reliever and creative outlet for Abeles.

"I never knew how much I liked the act of cooking, and making, and eating the food that I made until I began doing it more often," Abeles said. "So it's not just like food is medicine. It's also like the act and the enjoyment of making, and cooking and then consuming it's kind of this whole circle."  

Abeles has been in remission for 3 and a half years and is completing a master's degree in bioethics at Emory University.

He said much of his path has been shaped by his experiences.

"That's why I'm building the nonprofit I founded. That's why I do the research that I do. Because I can't just let it sit there, let a problem just exist without me interrogating it," Abeles said. "It irks me. Rather, I need to dive in and make it better."

When he's not in the kitchen or studying, he's working on his nonprofit, The Cairn Project.

The organization aims to help young adults discover themselves after cancer treatment, just like Abeles found a piece of himself in the kitchen.

He feels there are gaps in resources for young adults figuring out what's next following cancer treatment.

"Our goal is to help establish identity and balance for emerging adult cancer patients," Abeles said. "So what that really means is outside of treatment, to which treatment has gotten so much better, there is still a lack of support for emerging adults, where people like me go through treatment and then fall out and are left to their own devices to figure out jobs, to figure out school, to figure out life."

When it comes to his love for helping others, Abeles' organization is just the beginning. He's now applying to medical school because of the support from his professors and care team.  

"It solidified medicine is where I wanted to go because I see myself as a person that will lend his hand," Abeles said. "And when everybody lended their hand to me, that allowed me to hoist myself up and to continue with school and to continue with my academics and my extracurriculars and become the person I am today."

Abeles said he is hoping to launch programming for his nonprofit at the end of this semester.