I wanted to talk about my journey dealing with cancer, beating cancer and life after cancer. Let's all be honest and cancer SUCKS…definitely when you are 21 thinking nothing can stop you at the age. That is what happened to myself. You never think about something that could literally stop everything in its tracks. I never wanted to believe it and I still think that way at sometimes. This isn’t my life and this never happened.
So, let's go back to when this all started. This crazy journey that I am still on. I am 21 living at the beach with my boyfriend going to college. Everything is exciting and we are having an awesome time. I mean what 21 year old won't have a great time living at the beach in the middle of the summer. During this summer I had to get my gallbladder taken out. Not a crazy procedure.. something so simply. But at this point I have noticed that nothing in my life was simple but what is a girl to do. I go back home, have the surgery and go back to the beach 4 days later.
While I am working I am getting pains in my chest and around the area I had my surgery. I was advised to go to the hospital to make sure nothing was going on. My boyfriend comes and picks me up and takes me to the hospital. In the hospital and I get some scans done. They scan my abdomen and tell me that everything was okay with my surgery but…. That but was terrifying. Wondering all the possibilities that it could be or if everything is going to be okay. I get told I have a pericardial cyst and that I don’t have much to worry about but need to contact my family doctor and proceed from there.
So now I am just frustrated and honestly don’t want to have to drive back home to see my doctor once again. I put off seeing my doctor until my boyfriends forces me to go. See I had always complained about chest pains for some years now but my doctor always chalked it up to anxiety or something like that. So during that time of not going to the doctor I woke up one night having a hard time breathing and almost wrecked my car because one day I had such bad chest pains.
Finally, I get back home and go to the doctor. We set up appointments to see a heart doctor to fix what we thought it was but in the meantime she wanted to do a full body scan. I get this done and we stay the weekend back in our hometown. We head to my boyfriend's frat party and the previous college he was out. On the way I receive a call from my doctor and if nobody knows this, when a doctor calls you the day of your appointment usually something is wrong. I get this call and she is trying to contact my mother, she tell me it is not a cyst but I had a mass in my chest but it could of been tissue left from when I was baby or something else…she just didn’t really want to tell me what was going on. She calls me mom and I am guessing finally gets ahold of her beause while I am at my boyfriends parents house before going to the party her receives a call and walks out. This never happens and it was strange.
Fast forward to the party. We are having a good time and I had a few drinks in my and decided to pull him aside and ask who really called him. He tells me it was my mother and she told him to make sure I had a goodnight. Oh, so I was not able to go back to the beach and school that following monday. I needed to stay in town to meet with a surgeon.
Met with a surgeon and scheduled my biopsy for a Thursday. I was suppose to leave the hospital that night but they ended up collapsing my lung during surgery so I had to stay overnight.
Surgery is now done and I have to wait 4 painful days to hear the results. During this whole time my boyfriend nor I have returned back to school or the beach. Four days pass and I am in a meeting with an oncologist, radiologist, my surgeon and a nurse and I am told that I have a non hodgkins lymphoma and a 17 cm tumor in my chest. I drop out of school and move back home to start treatment a week later.
