9/6/2024, 2:22am | this is a blog entry about my experiences with cancer at a young age, the death of my father, and other assorted mental-health related topics. if that will be triggering for you, please skip this one.
Bravery is a complicated concept. When I was young, the way I saw it, was that bravery was the lack of fear.
The brave kids in the cartoons and my favorite books didnt cry, they kept pushing and they never asked for help, even when they were cold and hungry and the world seemed to be falling apart aroung them. I wanted nothing more than to be like them.
When I was 7 years old, my father died. He had a stroke, and was in the hospital for 7 weeks. He finally passed away on the 26th of September, 2015. When I heard the news, I cried, and I cried. My world had just turned upside down.
But I got back up. I told my mom that I wanted to go back to school right away. In my words, I didn't want to be "the weird kid whose dad died."
We moved to Oregon, and I started to put my life back together. My bravery, my perserverance, it came as complete silence. I shut out the world. I forgot what it was like to not live with a single mother.
I was quiet, so quiet. My mom sent me to therapy, but I never talked about much. Undertale released right before my father passed. I learned about it soon after, and it became all I would talk about with my therapist.
Despite my silence, I felt life was going back to normal, whatever that was. I found peace in my silence. If I didn't show my fear, if I didn't cry, if I didn't ask for help, people said I was so brave. That I was coping so well.
For years at that point, I had been experiencing what we all thought were growing pains. I would experience immense pain in my right leg, making it hard for me to even stand for extended periods. Every time I was taken in for an x-ray, nothing showed up.
The year after my dad died, in November, they came back with a vengeance.
I couldn't walk without feeling like I was going to die, or my bones were going to snap in half. I could barely lay still without beginning to cry. It took an entire month before we went to the hospital, because everyone still assumed they were growing pains.
Finally, it was validated in the black and white of an x-ray film. Something was wrong, and I wasn't crazy, this wasn't just an artifact of growing up too fast.
Things began to move very fast. Suddenly, I was in a hospital I had never seen before, getting funnelled into an MRI machine. Because I was so young, they put me under for the procedure.
Then I was in a cramped exam room, and they told me they still were unsure what it was. "It's either an infection or a tumor, and we don't know which. We'll need to do a biopsy to be sure."
At this point, my family was worried, and my grandma even flew up just to stay with us. Her and my mother would speak in hushed whispers when they thought they were out of earshot. I hated how much I was worrying them. I needed to be brave, needed to convince them I'd be alright.
The date of my surgery came and went. They told me I had a rare type of tumor, one I couldn't hope to pronounce (Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis), but that because they had taken a sample, it would go away on its own. I wouldn't have to stay for chemotherapy or radiation.
It's technically benign, but they warned me there was always a very rare chance of it re-occuring anyways. 5 years, 10 years, 20 years later, and there would always still be a chance. It doesn't metastasize, but it does spread. What a terrible thing to have to hear.
I was discharged from the hospital on Christmas eve, which my whole family was thankful for. When I heard the kids that stayed there got consoles and drones and other lavish gifts, I silently wished I had stayed one day longer. I was just 9 years old, after all.
I fell asleep on the couch, crutches beside it, watching the lights on the mini Christmas Tree on the side table slowly pulse.
They sent me home with a package full of oxycontin, telling me to take it whenever I was in pain. I never even opened the bag.
Once again, I began to settle into a new normal. Suddenly, I was a "cancer survivor," whatever that meant. I didnt feel that the label fit me. I hadn't done chemotherapy, and I only knew about the tumor when it was no longer a threat.
Did I even deserve the title? Was it stolen valor? I hoped not.
At the very least, I didn't have to wait long to get a much more definitive answer. At a check-up with my oncologist, she went through a list of routine questions. Have you been getting headaches? Blurry or double vision? Drinking a lot more water than usual?
The last one caught me and my mom off gaurd. How did she know? The month prior, I had suddenly began to drink far more water than was natural for me.
For years, my mom would have to fight with me to get me to finish even a single glass, and out of nowhere it was like I was dying in a desert.
My oncologist nodded, turned to type something. She referred me to get a second MRI, one of many I'd be getting over the next few years.
It turned out, the re-occurance wasn't just a hypothetical anymore. There was a second lesion, this one in my brain, and the only way out was a year of chemotherapy. Again, my life uprooted itself. Again, everything changed.
My true obsession with the concept of bravery started long before this, but the spark of intentionality was lit when I went in for my first session. I was cold, and I was hungry, and the world seemed to be falling apart around me.
A nurse came in, and she showed me what they'd be doing to me on a small plush frog named Hopper. I was terrified, and I wouldn't stop crying. But when I was able to get through the access with minimum screaming, she said she was proud of me, and that I was so brave.
As I saw it, the two were linked. If I wasn't brave, maybe she wouldn't have been proud of me. I should do better next time, cry less, learn to grin and bear it. Though this time, I didn't turn them down when they offered me anxiety meds beforehand.
The year was one of the longest in my life, while also feeling like it went by far too quickly. As time went on, I learned how to do it better. We had a whole system in place.
Versed as we came in. A child life specialist on call with a bag of hi-chews and an i-pad with a koi pond game on it, where you could click to make the fish startle. No countdowns before the acceess, I would try to move away when they hit one.
The whole time, the nurses would tell me so many wonderful things. I was doing so well, I was so funny, I was so brave. As my friends drifted away from me due to my time in the hopsital, I replaced social interaction with praise from a support network I didn't even realize I had.
But just as soon as it had began, it was over. At my final chemo session, everyone was there, every nurse I had met in the ward, my oncologist, my mother. They sang me a little song, and they rang a gong. It was over.
Shouldn't I be happy about this? Finally, it's over. You can get back to normal. If I wasn't sure what normal was before, I certainly didn't know now.
Everything I had relied on was suddenly gone. Being brave doesn't matter when you have nothing to be brave about. All the coping mechanisms that kept me safe suddenly were worse than useless, they were actively holding me back.
My friends we're gone, but I didn't have anyone else there to fill the void anymore. I felt like a husk of a person. I still couldn't ask for help.
I still kept up appearances, of course. Like all the nurses said, I was so brave, and I always kept a smile on my face. I found new friends. I lost them just as quickly, because I wasn't sure how to be a person outside of crisis.
Life blurred together. Suddenly, it was the pandemic. Suddenly, I was friendless once again. Suddenly, my life capsized and it still hasn't come back up for air just yet.
I'm honestly still not sure if I know how to be a person. So much more has happened since then, but I can't just keep rambling on.
As much as I ramble about the fear of cancer in this, I do want to add on at some point about all the joy I found throughout the experience. I got to go through the Make-A-Wish program and everything!
But I guess my point is, if it wasn't obvious, that bravery as a concept is one I don't find much use in anymore.
It's been a force of negativity in my life for so long. It still holds me back from getting better. I'm drafting this post instead of just texting my therapist right now, for instance. Do as I say, not as I do.
If you can learn to live with yourself, if you can let yourself be afraid, if you can drop the mask of bravery and say 'please, I'm scared, and I need help because I can't do this on my own,' do it. That's the better form of bravery.