Subject: Oh yeah?

So, I’m writing an essay for a scholarship essay contest, mostly because I thought the prompt was funny (and sadly ironic/relevant): What steps would you take if you were given a dire cancer prognosis? HAH. I can answer that from experience.

After writing a bit, I gave an excerpt to a close friend of mine to read. And to only be told that it was too bitter. WHAT?! I merely talked about how I had to leave Williams and the side effects of chemo. But that’s my own personal opinion…so I won’t dispute this.

But while arguing, it was mentioned that it sounded like I was giving up. And that “I was not fighting back hard enough.”

WHAT THE FUCK.

Perhaps you’d like me to “candy coat” the experience. YES, cancer is the BEST experience of your life. YES, you’ll love it when they inject drugs into you. YES, you’ll feel wonderful all the time. YES, you’ll love vomiting. YES, you’ll love to feel like shit all the time. YES, it’s not scary at all knowing that you could die.

Of course, my friend will just say that I’m over exaggerating and that if it happened to him, then he’d fight back “harder” and he’d be more “optimistic” about it. And not to be so “negative” about it.

Hello, my dear. Welcome to my life. My life is not wonderful. It is scary. It is painful. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You haven’t even seen me and what I’ve gone through. Try to be optimistic when you’re in the hospital for 5 days. You taste, you smell, you feel the chemo. It tastes like chemicals. It tastes like slightly plastic. You can’t get rid of it. It haunts you. It sickens you. It makes you want to vomit, but you can’t because you know that if you do, it will simply get worse. You can’t stand the smell of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant. Even when you’re home, you can remember how it burned your nostrils, caused you to almost gag. You can’t stand the color crimson, because it reminds you of the chemo drug doxorubicin, and how it made you pee orange-red every 1 hour. You can’t stand the smell of urine, but your heightened sense of smell forces you to do so anyways.

You get home. You thank god you’re out of the hospital. But this is just the beginning. You don’t want to eat. That’s usual. But your stomach feels like hell. It feels like something is weighing it down. It hurts, but you know that it will feel like this for at least 3 days. You can’t digest things very quickly. Chemo has fucking screwed over your digestive system. And to add to that, sometimes you feel nauseous. You won’t want to crawl out of bed because it feels like someone has pounded you over the head repeatedly. Your nails are turning black so you have to hide it with a brightly colored nail polish, and your once fair skin is also tinged with black - you can see it most promptly in your hands - because the chemo drugs have not entirely left your body. And it won’t until it’s maybe months or years after this is finished. And God knows what other damage it has done to your organs, your heart, your nerves, to anything. It’s simply still too early to tell. Your fingers are slightly numb, because the chemo drug vincristine has damaged your nerves. You are incredibly frustrated, because as a musician, your fingers are everything. You cannot feel the differences between the strings on the guitar, and you have to press your fingers on the fingerboard so hard that it’s painful, just so that you can even feel what you are doing. You are scared about your white blood cells, red blood cells, and oxygen content. If the levels are not high enough, you could pass out unexpectedly. And that’s so frightening, because it has happened once already. It feels like you’re being stuffed into a spinning bottleneck, with the air being sucked out of you. You gasp for air, your heart stops beating, the world is starting to lose its focus. And even though you come back to consciousness after a few seconds, the experience has caused you to realize just how fragile and vulnerable you are. You can never again walk around or run around confidently - you fear that you might overexert yourself and that this might happen again. Your mother is so scared that she contemplates buying an oxygen mask. You are so scared that for the next couple of days, you limit physical activity. You don’t want to get a blood transfusion, even though low oxygen content dictates that this is the best course of option.

You are also about to have surgery, where they are for sure going to cut out your 3rd rib. They are also going to cut into muscle, and it will leave at least a 5 inch scar, just beneath your left breast hopefully if the surgeon is nice. You might also need to have a piece of your breastbone removed, and maybe parts of your lung tissue. It will be at least a month of hell. Based on prior experience, you’re going to expect a chest tube, which will cause another dimension of pain. You probably won’t be able to breathe well without pain, your left side is definitely going to feel like a billion needles are pressing into it. And you hope that things will heal nicely and quickly, because the doctors don’t want to let the tumor grow soon again, so you will need to have chemo soon. You pray that chemo isn’t going to slow the healing process down and prolong the agony.

Try facing these things and being optimistic 100% of the time. It’s hard. I am mostly optimistic, but please let me have my moments of negativity. I’m scared. I’m frightened beyond belief. Cancer is so uncertain. I’m not even sure I’ll live to 30, even though the success rate is 80%. I’m so scared that it will come back after these 7-9 months of agony. And if it does, then the survival rate is less than 20%.

I’m crying, damn it. I honestly have not cried about the whole process of cancer/chemo so far, but seriously, this freaks me out so much. I could die. I might not be able to do all the things that I had planned. And God, I planned so much.