- I was actually way more comfortable being the cancer kid
than being the survivor who is healthy now.
- Hi.
- When I was about to enter middle school,
I ended up being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia
and then received three years of treatment
involving chemotherapy and brain radiation.
Today, I feel that the most difficult part of cancer
really was the afterwards.
Everyone's telling you how not to die,
but no one's really there to tell you how to live.
And that was the most difficult part for me.
The chemotherapy and the brain radiation that I received
just kind of had a really long aftereffect.
And even when you go to school and you look normal,
your body doesn't really listen to you still,
and I still had a really hard time
just making it through the day.
One of my most like poignant memories of that
was when I got to go to a birthday party.
They had this trampoline there and I was so excited
to not have to worry about my immune system,
and five minutes on the trampoline,
and I broke like three or four bones in my foot and ankle.
And I kind of equate my story to kind of like Cinderella
when she goes through this tumultuous
kind of painful, awful things to get to, you know,
finally getting to go to the ball as a normal partygoer.
And when you're thrown into normal life again,
just because you're wearing a ball gown,
does it mean you know how to dance?
And I sure didn't.
That's when depression set in
because I didn't really fit into either world.
I wasn't really sick anymore, but I wasn't healthy yet,
and there wasn't really room for where I was at in reality.
I learned about what chemo brain is
and how the change in your brain chemistry,
and it was just really helpful for me
to know that like it's not my fault, you know?
It's not something I'm doing.
It's not me not trying hard enough.
I'm really glad that I had the experiences that I had
and that my story ended up being the way that it was
because just like in Cinderella,
when she finally gets to that ball,
she's not worried about what everyone else is accomplishing,
what their timeline's like.
She just there to arrive.
That was her goal.
That's what I kind of realized.
I don't wanna be normal.
I wanna celebrate me and what makes me me
and just to arrive.
- The day I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia,
the doctor who delivered the news walked in
and he spoke to me for a couple of minutes.
That struck me as so odd.
Here I was, a young woman, alone in the emergency department
with no other people to support me.
Being delivered news of a fatal cancer diagnosis,
and then being encouraged to process it all alone.
I wanted to scream
I don't wanna be alone with my own thoughts.
I have been left alone with my own thoughts
plenty of times before, difficult times,
and if there were ever a time to not be left alone,
that would be right now.
Depression and anxiety had showed up in my life
way before cancer ever did.
If I'm being completely honest,
there was few times where things were so bad
and I was so hopeless that I had to be hospitalized
'cause I wanted to end my life.
To go from having a very strong desire
to wanting to end your life to mere years later
wanting nothing more but to stay alive,
to fight for your life,
to have an army full of medical professionals
and millions of dollars and insurance claims to stay alive,
that was a very dramatic contrast,
and it sure had a way of changing my perspective
on a lot of things.
Life's dots don't always connect right away.
Sometimes when you think of struggles, or hardship,
trying to figure out how to get
all these pieces back together,
to figure out how to heal yourself
can feel absolutely daunting.
And I felt like I had a lot of pieces
that I was trying to pick up
and put back together to heal myself.
Some time after my hair started growing back
and I started figuring out how to deal
with this really dry skin that chemotherapy had gifted me,
I began a process of deep reflection and healing,
which involved a lot of writing,
a lot of crying, a lot of therapy, and a lot of ice cream.
It's a really freeing feeling to know
that I'm no longer on other people's timelines.
That this time that I fought so hard for is for me
and only me to figure out what fulfills me the most
and can, hopefully, help others in the process, as well.
To kind of set things back, I always remind myself
that I defeated the biggest bully of them all,
which is cancer, and that gives me a bit of a superpower
to confront other challenges in life, as well.
At the end of the day, I'm still gonna say it.
Cancer's a beast.
It's a huge beast.
But for me, it was a beast that came in
and left me with no other choice
but to confront a lot of other beasts
that I had been neglecting for far too long.
Thank you.
- stand back? - Sure.
- I saw you kinda nod to me when you talked about timelines
because that's like my biggest thing, really.
I know our timing was a little different
in like when we were diagnosed,
but there is this pressure to like preform
and to oh, are you not here yet in life?
Like, what are you doing?
Like, what's wrong with you?
And people don't, they don't look at you
and say like oh yeah, you had cancer, you get a pass.
- Right.
- So I really appreciated that part of your story.
- I just related to almost every whole thing that you said.
I was just like wow, okay.
It did happen in different time periods,
but the part about Cinderella I thought was beautiful.
I went back to work I feel like way too soon.
I was still on maintenance chemotherapy
and I felt like I got what you were saying
about people just looked at you and said,
well, you have hair back, you have eyebrows.
- Right. - You seem together.
Meanwhile, I was running to the bathroom every few hours,
like falling, I was like I don't even know
how I can do this.
I was throwing up at work and I just,
I didn't know how to explain it.
I couldn't get it out to them that I was just struggling.
And with my history of mental health,
I just said no way, this isn't worth it for me right now.
I related to that a lot with the ball gown
'cause I feel like when we get the hair and the eyebrows
and people just are like you're better, that's it, right?
- Right. - Put it behind you.
For me, I'm always someone who's sought out community
in all aspects of my life.
I did mention mental health.
That was probably something that was the hardest for me
was that I feel like almost I didn't allow myself
to go find community,
it was part of the mental health battles.
But, in a way, I feel like that has taught me a lot
and how to handle this part of it.
I know going and joining community is not for everyone.
A lot of people have told me they don't wanna remember
their cancerversary, date of diagnosis.
They don't wanna talk about how this year
so and so many years ago they went into remission.
They're moving on, and I get that perspective.
I'm probably more on the opposite side where--
- You wanna celebrate this thing, yeah.
- Yeah, I wanna celebrate
and I think it's because of the mental health stuff,
just realizing that going and finding support
and going and speaking out about it and to be very honest,
I mean, people are more likely to listen, unfortunately,
and people wanna hear your story,
and so I just had this feeling of you know what?
I'm gonna start talking more about what I went through
with cancer and I'm gonna tie in the mental health
because I didn't really get as much a chance
'cause I feel like I was more ashamed by that one.
I go to a support group, a young adult support group
and it might change
because I'm still on a maintenance chemo
and maybe I reach the end and I'm like okay.
But for now, I find a lot of strength in community.
- I think you've kind of had it, too,
like this lens that you see the world through differently
and you just wish that you could everyone in the world
some goggles and like hey, this is like, you know,
how maybe you should look at people.
- Right.