Callie, Interrupted

It's pretty safe to say that this past year sucked, in many, many ways. 2017 was the hardest year of my life. There were some times when I felt like it would just never end, but lo and behold, here we finally are at 2018. Yes, it's just a small number change on the date, but symbolically it feels like a big deal to me. It's a blank slate, a new page, a fresh start. Today in particular, January 10th, means a lot to me. January 10th, 2017 was the day that I first went the hospital. I remember that day perfectly, from what I was doing that afternoon to what I was thinking about on the car ride over to what homework I was supposed to do that night. I remember it all so well it almost scares me. Today is a big day because it means that it has been a full year since everything began. It means that every day going forward can potentially remind me of the days from last year. At the same time, though, it also means that every day going forward can start to replace the days

I am officially in remission as of August 8th!!!!!! Since then, my life has begun to inch back to normal. Or at least, a new normal. I returned to school this year, participated in the school play, am hanging out with friends, and working on college applications. Everything is as it  should be, and most of the time I feel like I'm a typical high schooler. There are definitely some moments, though, when I'm walking in the hallway or doing my homework and I stop and think about how radically different my life is now compared with just a few months ago, and all that happened for me to get here. It's hard to look at pictures from the spring and see how pale I was. It's hard to remember what it felt like to get chemo. It's hard to believe that this all even happened, that it was real. I barely ever even use the word "cancer".  It's so easy to block it out entirely and go on with my daily life, and I kind of did that for the first month and a half of this

I've begun to think of my life as having two parts: a before, and an after. The before is my life leading up to January, when this all started. The after is my life since then. A lot of people have told me that going through this would change my perspective on life. That I would maybe understand better what was really important to me, who I want to spend time with, how I want to act. Initially I was hoping there would be some sort of lightbulb moment, or a switch would go off and suddenly I would have all the answers to how I was supposed to live my life from here on out, but that never happened. Life, as I have learned, never goes as planned, and nothing is ever simply laid out. So I've stopped looking for big shiny revelations, and I've started realizing that my answers lie in the little things. These are what I hold onto now. Little moments bring me so much joy now, small things I used to take for granted. Hearing a favorite song on the radio, playing board games w

One of my biggest worries going into all of this was what chemotherapy would actually entail. I’d often heard people sometimes consider the cure to be worse than the disease, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to getting an inside scoop on this. But, now that I have, here’s my personal take: believe what you hear. Chemo sucks. True to its name, it’s pretty much just a mix of different chemicals (all the doctors call it a “cocktail” of chemicals which I quite frankly find to be a gross description). The type and quantity of these chemicals vary depending on your diagnosis and size, so everyone gets different treatments. Being perfectly honest, I don’t actually know the names of the chemicals I get. They’re long and medical-sounding and I put them right out of my head months ago. What I do know is that my doctors are giving me a combination of medications that will cure the lymphoma and both prevent it from coming back later and reduce my risk of long term side effects. I really don

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 f

My name is Callie and I am a sixteen year old 11 th grade student. For quite a while I’d been hearing from parents, older classmates, cousins, and pretty much everyone in between that junior year was going to be so tough, that it was the most stressful year, basically that it would be terrible. So I was reasonably nervous going into the year, expecting mounds of homework and tons of essays and tests every week. I wasn’t entirely wrong with my assumption—I definitely got what I expected in terms of schoolwork. What I didn't expect was that halfway through the year my life would take quite the detour. Suddenly junior year being “tough” was just about the understatement of the year. On January 13 th , 2017 (a Friday the 13 th , go figure), I was diagnosed with Stage 2A Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I began chemotherapy the very next day, and am still currently undergoing treatment. Never in a million years would I think this was how my junior year was going to go, and it’s definitely not ho