Cancer.
It's a curse.
It turns people's lives upside down and ruins their relationships.
Brynne Foster is a perfect example.
After being diagnosed with leukemia at age 17, Brynne's family struggles to accept her decision of refusing chemotherapy...
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Wait to play the song above.
"You have cancer?" Blake's broken voice echoes in my brain.
There, there it is; There is the question that I have been dreading answering. For a second, I close my eyes to escape from reality.
What is cancer?
Books of medicine will tell you that cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissue. It slowly eats away at your healthy cells until there are none left.
Cancer kills over ten million people a year worldwide.
Even after all these years of suffering, doctors still have not found a cure for cancer. Sure, there are chemotherapy and radiation, but there is no cure. A swallowable pill to cure yourself, does not exist. So, we are left to hurt until the day cancer finally kills us. The lucky people die early on, and do not have to experience the pain of family members insisting on alternative treatment plans. Us unlucky ones have to watch the people around us suffer as well. As if dying wasn't hard enough, you have to comfort others while you do it.
Most of the time, cancer is a word that scares people to the grave. The constant fear of having cancer is unhealthy, but many people live with this phobia. Tracking everything they put in their mouths and exercising on a daily, these people grow paranoid that they will one day wake up with a tumor in their bodies. Nevertheless, people like this still end up with cancer. It's unavoidable.
Everyone has different experiences with cancer. For some, treating cancer is as easy as zapping a mole off your back. For others, cancer is a death sentence. But most of the time, cancer is treatable by an extraction surgery and then a couple of rounds of chemotherapy.
That is not the case for me. It will never be the case for me. Even if I hadn't waited so long for the chemo, I would still have had a small survival percentage. Stage 3 lymphoblastic leukemia is almost always deadly in children. At least that's what the statistics say.
The couple scans I had at the hospital showed that my white blood cells have almost doubled, and my lymph nodes have enlarged. My CT scan lit up like a Christmas tree when it searched the base of my lungs. It turns out that tiny tumors have found their way into my respiratory system, and that is why I've been having trouble breathing the past few days. Lucky me, right?
My body is filled with foreign sickness and things that I do not quite understand. Some days, it's too much for me to handle.
Some days I wish I could die and stop feeling like this.
But then I remember my mom and dad; and how they would be destroyed if I died. I think about how empty Grant would feel without me. I consider Elise and how she would blame herself for my death.
And finally, I think about Blake. I feel guilty for even thinking about leaving him, leaving the man I care about alone in this scary world.
Sometimes, I wish that he was enough to make me stay. Sometimes I wish that I had more fight left in me when he talks about a future together.
