My Origin Story

How did this all begin, you may be wondering. How did I find out what was wrong? The short answer is that I got a bunch of tests done over a week in January leading up to the diagnosis. The better and longer answer starts in October, when I developed a little, seemingly benign cough that would plague me the entire fall. It was this cough that told me something wasn’t completely right, and it would turn out to be a major warning sign for what was to come.

At first I assumed the cough would go away naturally, but weeks were passing and nothing was changing. I visited various doctors who all prescribed me different things but nothing seemed to really be working. I had begun to suspect that this was no normal cough, but most people generally laughed me off when I said so. It had almost become a running joke with me- it was always coming up in conversation, because I was literally always coughing. I even wrote a paper in English about how my distracting cough had prevented me from fulfilling an assignment. The problem was that I wasn’t just feeling physically under the weather—whatever was going on was starting to affect my emotions, outlook, and patience as well. I was having crazy mood swings and was just feeling generally upset pretty much all the time all fall. I was so scared that this was just how I was now, that this was just what happened when you got older and I would have to learn to live with feeling sad all the time. I was scared it meant something more. Other people were catching on too—my English teacher and my school principal noticed that I wasn’t really acting like myself, and reached out to my mom about it, who was of course worrying about that as well. I just couldn’t really shake it off, nor could I shake the never ending saga that was my cough.

Everything came to a head when I visited my allergist (spoiler alert: the cough was not allergy related) and he noticed a swollen lymph node on my neck. That had developed around the same time as my cough, but it never seemed like a big issue. However, I guess it was looking especially large that day—and thank goodness it was—so my allergist immediately sent me to my pediatrician for a chest x-ray. The results came back a few hours later and we were told to go straight to the ER.

Things happened pretty quickly after that. I'll spare everyone the gory details of my hospital extravaganza, because that's not very exciting to talk about. Basically after staying in the ER that whole night, I was transferred to a hospital room and proceeded to have a lot of different tests to determine the proper diagnosis, even though the doctors seemed to already have a pretty good guess, based on the fact that my room was in the childhood oncology wing. I went into surgery to get a biopsy done on my neck node and was pretty loopy on anesthesia afterwards (I apparently said some weird stuff afterwards, like "I feel bad, I was so mean to Jack from Lost because I didn’t want him to be with Kate!". I also sang the entire Backyardigans theme song). I also got a CT scan and pet scan. At this point in time I began to suspect that this hospital visit was probably going to extend past this school week. I'd been planning on participating in a school acapella performance that Friday, but the odds of that happening seemed slim. On Thursday I sent a super casual text to the director of the piece, saying super casually how I was in the hospital, but don't worry it's a super casual visit and everything's fine. I was kind of more concerned with other people getting spooked knowing I was in the hospital than actually being there. In fact, my priorities were so out of whack that on the initial drive up to the hospital after rehearsal, I was bemoaning the fact that I wouldn't be able to finish any homework assignments. I know, I'm ridiculous.

Anyway, on Friday, the day I was supposed to be performing in school, I heard my diagnosis for the first time. A whole team of doctors came in to confirm what everyone in the room except me already suspected—I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a form of cancer commonly found in adolescents. I started my chemotherapy treatments the next day, and stayed in the hospital for about a week longer.

I think about the fall of 2016 a lot nowadays. Hodgkin's Lymphoma is a very slow growing type of cancer, so it had been stirring in me for months, maybe even since this past summer or spring. Most of the issues I was having were caused by the tumor in my chest, getting slightly stronger and slightly bigger with each passing week. Everything was building up—the cough was getting worse because the tumor was pressing down more and more on my lungs, my general emotional state was getting worse because there was something tangible and malevolent growing in my body, like a little Exorcist demon. Of course this was not at all the explanation I wanted, but in an odd way it was a little vindicating to know that this hadn't all been in my head, that there was an actual reason for why this was going on, and that it could be fixed. That's what i hold on to now—the not knowing pained me, and knowing now is not really any easier, but there is a clear end in sight, and I did not feel that way in October.