Thank you all for your wonderful responses to Monday’s cancer story series kick-off post, Cancer-Free…But Maybe Not. My biopsy is scheduled for next Monday, and it’ll be up to a week afterward before I hear the results. Several people have asked me how I’m coping with the wait. The answer is: I feel perfectly fine most of the time, even positive. I try not to focus on this thing I can’t change (repeat: ACCEPT) and when I do, I’m good at rationalizing the worry away. But the anxiety is still there, simmering in my subconscious, and it comes out when something small, even insignificant, goes wrong. For example, yesterday I logged onto WordPress and found that all my website statistics from the previous day had disappeared. That was frustrating, as I’d gotten a lot of traffic that day, and I hated seeing it drop to zero. Even more frustrating was when I tried posting the problem on a tech support message board and couldn’t find my password OR the “forgot password” button on said message board. At that point, I kind of lost it. Kicking a foam soccer ball may have been involved. (At times of anger, having kid toys in the house is quite useful.) But even while I was raging, I recognized that it wasn’t the site stats that were frustrating me. (They ended up coming back on their own a couple of hours later.) It was the threat of cancer that my non-rational, anxious subconscious couldn’t argue away.

As the Foda (Female Yoda) says, it’s the small things that tip the balance.

In the meantime, I appreciate all of your thoughts and prayers, and am excited to hear from those of you willing to share your cancer stories with me. We all need a place to share, and so often the places available to us are full of negativity and fear. I’d like to provide the antithesis of that on this blog: support, gratitude, positive attitudes (with just a dash of soccer-ball kicking, if need be).

My Cancer Story…

My cancer story began at the end of June, 1995. I’d just finished eighth grade, and my mom took my sister and me to our pediatric group for a checkup. I’m very fortunate that my parents were diligent about doctor’s visits, even back then; also that they chose my birthday to schedule the appointments around, rather than my sister’s in March, which may have been too early or much too late for the pediatrician to find what she did. After probing my neck and feeling a growth on my thyroid, she sent us to a local ENT (ear/nose/throat) specialist and told my mother not to delay. Within one visit, the ENT scheduled me for surgery without so much as a biopsy. (I think he strongly suspected cancer, but it was also a large enough growth that it would have had to come out anyway.)

My surgery was scheduled for Friday, July 21, 1995. The plan was to get me home in time for my fourteenth birthday, three days later, but that did not happen. I was in surgery for several hours, and the weekend was spent recovering from the anesthesia and keeping the pain under control. I knew things had taken a more serious turn, but I didn’t ask questions, even when I saw my parents’ red-rimmed eyes. I spent my birthday in the “teen room” of the hospital’s pediatric wing, where there was a big space for family and friends, a Ms. Pac Man machine, and pizza (which my post-anesthesia stomach could barely handle).

The next morning, my favorite pediatrician came to tell me I had cancer. He told me my entire thyroid had been removed, and I’d need to have further treatment. He gave me my first bottle of synthroid, the thyroid-replacement hormone I’d have to take every day for the rest of my life. I still only had a fuzzy idea of what a thyroid did (we didn’t cover glands in science class until the following year). I only understood that it was a hormone that could control my mood, my weight, and other vitally important functions. I asked the doctor, “Will I be different?” I think I wanted reassurance that my personality wouldn’t change as a result of the hormone. He replied, in my first taste of much-needed levity, “No, you’re still going to be the same rotten kid you always were.”

It took three-and-a-half years: three additional surgeries to remove infected lymph nodes; three doses of radioactive iodine (a treatment comparable to chemo or radiation, but unique to thyroid cancer); countless ultrasounds, MRIs, and blood tests; weeks I shuffled through on low doses of thyroid hormone to prepare for more testing; and a switch from local hospitals to Massachusetts General and Memorial Sloan-Kettering. But in the end, that “rotten kid” survived, and while I might not ever be the same, I’m grateful for most of the ways I’m different. I spent my adolescence with cancer. At a time when my peers were experimenting with drugs for recreation, I was taking them to save my life. At a time when my friends were getting tattoos and belly-button piercings, I was getting permanent scars on my neck. Those experiences didn’t just change me; they completely formed my character.

For those of you who’ve had cancer, or another serious illness, how do you think it changed you? Do you think the time of your life that it happened made a difference?