How Cancer Changed My Life

serious towards everything. I would stop talking to my friends from Kingwood High School and my friends from New Jersey and as well as my family. Then one day, i suddenly became really tired and light headed and unable to function correctly. In a matter of minutes i was rushed to the hospital, and multiple test was concluded and the result was showing that i had stage two colon cancer. The word Cancer didn't shock me or scare me, but the only thing that scared me was the result of having cancer and how it's going to change me and what i have to through in order to live or have my normal life back.

I had been really struggling with my leukemia during the month of January. Bruises covered my body and my weight had dwindled down. The worst part of all of this was keeping the secret from Landon. He saw a difference in me no matter how hard I tried to hide it. One day Landon and I went to grab a bite to eat at Cecil’s Diner. That was where I decided I needed to tell him. We were walking back from the diner, arm-in-arm, hoping not to be blown away by a nor’easter. I incited the conversation by asking, “People think I am weird, do they not.”

Everyone hears the word “Cancer” and automatically thinks death? Imagine being told you have cancer a month before Christmas and having to start chemotherapy right away. That was me at age 16 barely a junior in High School, they say high school is supposed to be a great experience. And it was at the beginning which was my freshman and sophomore year. I was that girl athlete with lots of friends who went day by day not caring about my health I would eat lots of junk food and stay up late at night. I come from a Hispanic family single parent my mom and 4 siblings 3 girls and one boy. Two had already gotten married and there was only 3 left at home including me. My mom would work out in the fields so sometimes she 'd come home late, therefore

My worst fear is getting shots. This arose when I was two years old, and had many visits to the doctor’s office because there were concerns about my respiratory system. I had to have many blood tests, which weren’t only scary, but also were painful. The blood tests came out normal, but it was later discovered I had asthma. After I had a severe reaction to tree nuts at around five, I had to have even more blood tests to determine if I had other allergies.

The sky and all its beautiful colors are all that were running through my mind. I didn't notice it then, but that was the last day we ever had those moments not only there but back home too. I never expect for him to leave, which was foolish. He found happiness in the bottom of a drink, how couldn't alcohol take him? I realize we're all trying to kill that pain somehow. I didn't imagine his death would take a hold of my life, but in a way it did. You see he was the only close death, I experienced in my 17 years, before him I didn't think death would ever influence me, for it was just a life check everyone check off eventually. I took his death as unexplained for so long, all I had angry and unresolved feelings and they controlled a part of my life. I know that pain will always be there, but my life couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let this unresolved grief influence me as my uncles did. Although death is a sad thing, you have must choose whether to let it destroy oneself or sharpen it. I’m still on the path of understanding how life is after the death, still I remember he loved us and he isn’t sadden anymore, and that gives me joy and keeps on

During my sophomore year, I became depressed and antisocial due to problems in my life. My mother has been sick with a brain tumor since 2009 and she was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012. It has been very hard on me and especially for my mother. I worry about her because she has shown signs of severe depression, she often talks about that she would rather be dead than alive anymore. After all of the pain, all of the humiliation of not being able to walk well, the embarrassment of not being able to write well, all of the staring and comments I would hear about my mother, she is still strong. After 6 years of pain and suffering along the way, I do not blame her. Everything seems to get worse. She now needs surgery due to avascular necrosis that was caused by many years of chemotherapy. I began to lose motivation slowly because I did not have any friends in any of my classes and I felt like I was stuck in a

I remember thinking about how fortunate I was for having none of my family members to die from cancer. It was just another late night of working hard in the laboratory trying to find something. It was precisely 10 o’clock at night where I had never felt so accomplished. I had finally done it, I found the cure to cancer. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes when I had been reading the chart, but when I gave the antibodies to cancer patients their symptoms left and their cancer had been cured. I was 35 when I had found the cure and I lived in Iowa City, which is where I met my wife. I called my wife, Selena, and told her about my discovery and she started crying. It was a different type of cry..no it wasn’t tears from joy, it was tears from sadness. I asked Selena why she was crying. That day was never forgotten, not because of my discovery, but of the news that my wife told me. Our son passed away that afternoon from Lung Cancer. I was devastated. I went into a deep depression and I kept asking myself, “why couldn’t you have found the cancer just a couple hours earlier.” My story was all over the news, for awhile I never cared about anything but my son. I had received an extremely high number of money. I didn’t care about money anymore. I gave over half of it to people who needed it more than I did. I didn’t feel like doing interviews until about 6 months after his death. I learned something from my experience, In order to achieve your goal, sacrifices will need to be made. I found the cure to the most deadliest thing in the world but I had lost my most prized

“Sarah has cancer,” is a phrase that changed my life. I was barely ten years old when my dad picked me up from volleyball practice to explain why my little sister had been in the hospital so much. At the time, Sarah was eight and had been in and out of hospitals and various doctor’s appointments over the past two months to try and figure out what was going on. Learning she had cancer was both a relief and burden. The feeling of relief occurred because now we finally knew what was wrong, but it was a burden because you hear about cancer in the elderly, not in eight year-old girls that love sports.

At that point all I would ever hear from people was, “oh you poor thing”, or “I’m sorry!” The only thing I heard was people pitying me, but in contrary, those words and moments only sparked a strength that I never thought was achievable. I promised myself to turn those words that represented sorrow into drive to fuel that strength. The first memory that I realized that inner strength was when I was first told that I had cancer. I heard the door click open, five doctors appeared in their white coats, they would come in surrounding me at the hospital bed. I just laid there confused about why all of this was happening. None of them spoke for a minute. My guess is that they were trying to figure out how to tell a fourteen-year-old that she has cancer as if they expected me to start breaking down sobbing. Instead, my eyes refused to shed a single tear as just hearing the words, “ You have cancer.” Those three words turned my life upside down in a matter of a second. Then I proceeded to process them in my mind. Trying to calculate a solution as if it were a math problem. As if it was that easy, but I still managed to ask the question that I never

“There are a couple different treatments we could do, however I personally think that the chemo is our best option. There will be a long hard road ahead of us, but I think we can do it! Now your cancer hasn’t spread yet and that’s why I think it is best to start as soon as we possibly can. Here’s what we can do…” the doctor went on and on and on. It was so hard to (even (omit)) grasp what he was saying. So much was running through my head. I was beginning to cry again, but this time I in a private room instead of in front of a waiting room full of people. “Why don’t we go for a little walk. Maybe to get a snack or something.” Caleb thought it was a good idea because he figured I needed to just get away from all the talk of chemo and treatments and well, cancer. He could see the fear in my eyes. “I’m so scared.” I thought I was crying as hard as I possibly could but boy was I wrong. “I know you are, and you have the right to be, it’s a scary thing. But you know that I will be here for you through everything, okay. I’m not going anywhere.” The doctor said I needed a good support system, and man did I have the

No one thinks that it will happen to them. No one thinks that one day it might be them walking into the doctor’s office, only to hear those three horrifying words – “You have cancer.” To say that cancer changed my life is an enormous understatement. Cancer took me on an insane roller coaster for two years.. turning, twisting, jerking. I never thought it would happen to me. I heard those three lethal words, but they were not spoken to me. My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December of 2014.

The next morning I didn’t want to get out of bed but I knew I had to. Whispering a prayer Lord don’t let me go down into the grave with my husband take me through this let the hurt- hurt until it’s over just get me through it day by day. Let me not be bombarded by people who mean well but say the wrong things during times such as this.

My worst fear, I did say my worst fear was having children and raising them alone! I was willing to subject myself to all manner of

After a while of sitting in my grandparents living room mindlessly playing with my toys I decided to get up. I walked towards the commotion going on in the small hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen. The gathering of people consisted of my mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma. Curious about what was going on I walked over to the group. I reached my mom and looked up to see that her eyes were bloodshot, as if she had been crying. I looked over to my dad and his face, like everyone else's, was grim. During this time I kept hearing one repeating word, cancer. I started to listen more closely to the conversation going on around me because even at the age of seven I knew that cancer was bad news. I listened intently and heard my mom explain how she had colon cancer.

When I turned 11-years-old my whole childhood began to change my life went from being perfect to everything but perfect. One day I came home to hear the news my father, my best friend; my hero was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Not knowing the struggle my family was about to take on I just began to cry. I had a million things running through my head what’s going to happen? Will everything be okay? Why him? What is going to happen? With all these things rushing through my head all I could do was cry not knowing this was least worse to come.