By Will Boring
The Emery
Ann Arbor Huron HS
1st Place
Division 2, News Writing
Alone in my room, I was cold, bald and pale. I was weak. I felt trapped by the way the walls of my room surrounded me: four walls of silence, four walls of loneliness, four walls of isolation.
Cancer is a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. It takes over your life. Before being stuck in my room, I had a life. A good life. I had friends, things to do, and a purpose. Everything changed in my second year of middle school.
Rain On My Parade
I had just finished my seventh grade year at Clague. It was one of the best years of school for me. I started breaking out of my comfort zone, making new friends, starting to build a reputation for myself.
That summer, I’d hang out with friends — buy comics at The Vault of Midnight, wander around downtown with friends, even walk on the railroad tracks for fun. Life was moving in the right direction. I had no idea that everything would change in a matter of a day.
In late July, during the week of my 13th birthday, I went up North with my mom and grandmother to a cottage on Burt Lake Michigan. Towards the end of our stay, we were playing a game of cards at the kitchen table when my mom noticed a lump on the side of my neck. I was confused and had no idea what she was talking about, so I got up from the table and went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror, and there it was — a huge lump on the left side of my neck, from just below my ear running down to the middle of my neck. I was both shocked and concerned.
My first thought was that a spider had bitten my neck and my body was just having an allergic reaction. My grandmother told me of her previous history of having had a fatty tumor on her back. It looked like it could be a fatty tumor, but I wasn’t sure. My mom didn’t think it was anything to worry about, but I insisted that she call my doctor.
Reassuring worries
After she got on the phone with my doctor’s office. The nurse on the line agreed that it most likely was a benign lump caused by a bug bite. She told us to apply pressure and a hot or cold compress on the lump. If there wasn’t any decrease in the size of the mass, I needed to get it checked out.
The week at Burt Lake was over and by the time we got back home, it wasn’t getting any smaller, and my parents thought I should get seen right away. The nurse who we talked on the phone with examined me, and once again concluded that it was an enlarged lymph node caused by a bug bite. She showed me a diagram of the lymphatic system on the human body, which basically is a network of tissues and organs that help the body get rid of toxins, wastes and other unwanted materials. She instructed us to go into a local clinic to get my blood drawn and tested, just to make sure there was nothing to worry about.
Of course, she said, there was a chance it could be malignant, but it most likely was benign. I was concerned that it was cancerous despite her reassuring hypothesis, but I still had hope. What more could I do but hope?
After that appointment, my dad and I headed straight to the clinic. I was nervous walking in. It had been awhile since my last blood draw and I knew what was waiting for me behind those curtains. I sat in the Phlebotomy chair, put my arm out, and made a fist with one hand to expose the veins on the arm they were drawing my blood from. As they pierced the needle through my skin, I gripped my dad’s fingers as hard as I could, hoping I wouldn’t cut off his circulation. When I was done, they wrapped my arm with gauze and taped it together.
It took about an hour for the lab results to come in, then a few more hours for the paperwork to be sent to my doctor. The anticipation was killing me. My dad got a call from the office and once again, my nurse’s hypothesis was the same as before. There were no signs of any cancer cells in my body. My blood count for my immune system were different then how they normally would look, but she said that was because my body was fighting off something, possibly related to the supposed bug bite. I let out a sigh of relief when I heard the good news. I walked around with a smile on my face for the rest of the day.
A Short Trip to Canada
A couple of weeks later, in the middle of August, my parents and I took a trip to Rondeau, Canada, to a cabin owned by one of my mom’s close friends, Lisa. Loading our truck with our bags and other personal items only took an hour, but it felt like several. By the end, I felt light-headed, short of breath, and tired despite only carrying three bags. I climbed the steps to my bedroom to rest and I felt even more exhausted. Still, I wanted to go to Canada, to get my mind off things. My dad called me downstairs to get into the truck, I made my way down each step, taking my time to make sure I wouldn’t be short of breath after reaching the bottom of the staircase. I walked out the door, shut and locked it behind me, then we pulled out of the driveway.
We drove three hours to Rondeau, but eventually we made it to the dead end of the road where Lisa’s cabin was. After we pulled in and parked, I was hit with a sudden feeling of exhaustion. It was difficult to breathe and I was drenched in sweat. I had to lay down and rest. My body sunk into the couch in the living room.
Lying on that couch, it felt like I had 200 pound weights on my chest. My dad stepped in the cabin door just after carrying in the few bags left in the truck. He watched me struggle to take a breath as I laid in the living room, wiped completely out of energy. He took my temperature. It was way over 98.7, and I was burning up. My parents quickly got on the phone with my doctor’s office and were ordered to drive to the nearest urgent care as soon as possible. In a state of concern and confusion, my parents immediately repacked everything back into the truck. We barreled our way across the border and down the highway to IHA Urgent Care.
When we arrived, we were seen by a doctor, a tall man and had a particularly balding head of red hair that grew under his chin and around his mouth. He said that he wanted me to get a chest x-ray to test for abnormalities. They had me stand on a mat in a gown with my feet spread apart from each other. Then, I was told to lift my arms up and hold a cold metal bar just above my head, and take a breath as deeply as I could.
The scan went quickly and I was taken back into the examination room where my parents were anxiously waiting. I laid down on the exam table’s crinkly paper, and the doctor took a look at the lump on my neck. After checking around my upper torso, under my armpits, across my collar bone and around the rest of my neck, he found a few, small pea sized lymph nodes that weren’t supposed to be there.
After leaving to review the results of my scans, the doctor walked back in with a worried look on his face.
“It looks like lymphoma.”
At first I didn’t have a clue what “Lymphoma” was. Then, I thought “cancer.”
I asked my doctor in a shaky voice if that’s what he meant by “Lymphoma.”
He nodded.
Fear
My mom started shaking. As tears fell down my parents’ traumatized faces, all I could hear was ringing in my ears. It seemed like I had lost my grip on gravity. The world didn’t feel real. Reality was just an illusion.
I was pulled back into the Earth’s spectrum by a turn of my doctor’s computer screen. A set of lungs – my lungs – appeared on the screen. A large, white mass spread around the center of the photo. It was a malignant tumor, the size of a softball, inside my chest, compressing down on my lungs.
The shock of my diagnosis made my shortness of breath even worse. I could hardly breathe. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I turned to my dad.
“I don’t want to die.”
My dad looked at me and said, “You’re not going to die.”
Questions Unanswered
The doctor left the room and came back with a CD copy of my scans. He handed the disk to my dad and told him that I needed to go to the ER at Motts Children’s Hospital, to be re-evaluated.
I slowly walked out of the room with my arm over my mom’s shoulder and made eye contact with my doctor. Tears flooded my eyes as I looked him in the face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
When I first walked through the doors of Domino’s Farms, I thought nothing was seriously wrong with me, at least not as serious as cancer. It dawned on me how different my life would be after leaving the urgent care. Although my parents and I had no idea what was going to happen, we tried our best to keep a clear state of mind.
Alone On My Own
Abandoning a friend with cancer is one of the worst things that someone can do.
I spent most of 2017 sitting in the living room on the couch, staring out the picture frame window, watching each car go by, wondering what I did wrong.
I noticed that friends and people I knew from school always expected me to be and feel happy. But I couldn’t. Chemo wipes the energy out of your body, but it also finds a way to wipe the smile off your face. There is no way for a cancer patient to magically, presto, changeo, “be happy.”
Friends just lacked a sense of understanding. I tried explaining everything but they never fully grasped the whole concept of what cancer treatment was all about. I got tired of trying to explain to them, over and over again, what was happening to me. It was frustrating.
I never understood how someone can be at a person’s side at one moment, then treat them like they have never met before. After I got cancer, it felt like my friends fell off the face of the earth.
Maybe my friends thought that I disappeared or that I had just switched schools. Either way, they could have reached out to me to see what was going on.
As for family – some of them understood and were there for me. But a lot of them were never really there. I have two uncles on my dad’s side from whom I’ve heard nothing at all, and it’s been almost four years since I’ve had cancer.
Making connections with someone with cancer, a friend or family member is vitally important for not only the patients physical health but their mental health. Checking in with them alone, gives them a sense of hope just to know that someone’s there. Our physical health has changed but we are still the same.
The Reality of Cancer
Cancer treatment comes in different forms and goes on for various amounts of time. For each type of cancer, there is a specific treatment tailored to each individual patient. Different people respond better to chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow transplants or immunotherapy. For lymphoma, depending on the stage, the patient will receive a wide amount of chemotherapy drugs to help fight off the disease.
In the induction phase of treatment, the objective is to destroy cancer cells at a rapid rate. During this phase, I was given infusions of vincristine, an anti-cancer drug that targets and kills cancer cells. Before receiving any chemo, I had a bone marrow and lymph node biopsy to test for my type and stage of cancer. Additionally, I had Peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) line implanted in my arm because chemotherapy is too strong of a drug to be infused into veins directly. While undergoing chemo, my hands became chapped and my feet began to swell. I had to inject lovenox, a blood thinner, into my stomach everyday because the drug to treat my cancer was notorious for causing blood clots. For a while, I would inject them into my stomach myself, until I developed neuropathy in my arms and legs. I could barely hold my hands steady enough to inject the shot. The induction phase lasted for twenty nine days.
After induction, the consolidation phase begins. Undetected cancer cells in bone marrow or blood may still be present in the body. To prevent a relapse, chemotherapy continues for a period of time. This phase lasts for four to eight weeks. After the mass and my chest shrunk, a port was implaced under my skin on my chest. It went into the same artery as the PICC, but it was easier to access and did not hang out of my body. Every Tuesday, I was given more doses of vincristine- methotrexate by a spinal tap. It was a vicious cycle. Everytime, I started to get better, I would get another spinal tap.
The interim-maintenance phase of treatment starts after the four to eight weeks of consolidation are over. This phase is intended to kill any and all cancer cells in blood or bone marrow that are gone undetected. During this period, I was given vincristine and methotrexate through IV, as well as more doses of methotrexate by mouth. My body was also introduced to mercaptopurine, a drug that is used for both cancer and autoimmune diseases.
After eight weeks, the delayed intensification phase began. This phase is one of the most important phases in treatment because it improves the event-free survival, the time after treatment when the patient does not have any symptoms of relapse. On top of the same drugs as before, intense and highly concentrated drugs were administered. There is one drug I will never forget: doxorubicin. It is the strongest chemo drug ever invented. While receiving the drug, the cold foregin liquid pushed through the line of my port and flowed in my veins all across my body. I was hit with an uncontrollable amount of emotion.. My heart raced and I started to have a panic attack. After my clinic visit, my dad drove me straight home, I locked myself in my room and cried.
During the intensification phase of chemo, I started to experience emotional changes.I suffered from depression during this time. I constantly felt alone with not many people reaching out. I wondered why the people, who I had always been there for, weren’t really there at all. My mind kept telling me that no one cared. I felt that after treatment, no one would look at me the same. I was convinced that everyone was afraid of me. I tried a lot of times to get the attention of my friends, but nothing worked. I began to realize that they truly did not care.
I thought often about taking my own life. I had lost my purpose. I couldn’t stand living in a world with so much pain. I was hopeless. Almost every day I would cry in my room, surrounded by my four walls. I thought that my battle was to hard of a battle to fight. I cried until I had no tears left.
The final stage was the maintenance phase. I was given a tight schedule. I took mercaptopurine every night, every four weeks I would get an infusion of vincristine, every three months spinal taps, every other tuesday, I would take thirteen tablets of methotrexate by mouth. Each maintenance cycle lasts for 84 days and is repeated for 3 years. The goal of this treatment is to consolidate and maintain remission. It was vitally important that I took all my meds, received all infusions and injections, on schedule so that my body had steady doses of chemo to wipe out any and all cancer cells.
My Life Now
I finished treatment on Dec. 27, 2018. In the end, I was exhausted, my body was exhausted. I went through a lot of changes physically and emotionally. My mood went up and down. My thought process got delayed and my memory was a fog. I do still have a chemo brain, which causes cognitive impairment and makes thought processes extremely difficult. Sometimes I say words that don’t make sense, which makes some of my conversations confusing and forgettable.
Due to the treatment, I was diagnosed with avascular necrosis. The disease eats away at the bone in both of my knees and hips, which kept me from walking, running and even standing. I still live with pain of avascular necrosis, but since exercising and taking vitamin D, my condition has improved significantly.
Even though I still have to go into the hospital for routine appointments, I don’t have to take any more chemotherapy. I have no more spinal taps, infusions of poison into my body, bone marrow biopsies, blood thinner injections, blood clots or hair loss. On top of Avascular Necrosis and chemo brain, I still sometimes experience suicidal thoughts and depression. The thought of cancer still haunts me, but the support from loved ones around me, keeps moving me forward.
I try my best to enjoy every new day. I hope in the future, people will learn to love cancer patients unconditionally, the same way as before they got sick.
We are still ourselves. Our bodies may have changed but we have the same heart. You are you. They are them. I am Will. We are the same.
NW-14. Personal Narrative
This is not an opinion piece. It is a first-person account of an event or series of events that constitute a single, profound experience. The focus of the piece is on narrative — telling the story of the experience. It can be written in present or past tense. The author should take extra efforts to describe the journey and explain its importance. Dialogue and internal dialogue are essential. Submit a PDF of the print page(s) on which the story was published or the URL to the story on an online news site.
JUDGING CRITERIA
- A first-person account depicting a personal experience
- Lead captures attention, arouses curiosity
- Topic relevant to interests and/or welfare of school or students
- Effectively combines basics of good news and feature writing
- Effectively organized with smooth transitions; carefully outlined
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar
- Should have byline, which could include mug shot of writer