Callie, Interrupted

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...