I was given seventeen months to live.

Hey there! I hope you are all having a fabulous day or night. Let me share some of my story before I start the official blog for tonight. Please don't hate me if I get the chronological order a little wrong here and there. I am literally writing what is on my mind and sometimes I can be a little scatterbrained. It also is all kind of blur and seems like some weird distant dream I had a couple nights ago that is hard to recall in the right order.
In August 2010 I was told I had brain cancer. I was sixteen. BAM. That is the point where you become drawn in and keep reading my sob story right?
I have the best friend in the whole entire world that basically went through the surgeries with me. Her mom had to tell her to leave the hospital and come home on school nights, sometimes even on weekends as well. I have amazing family that risked future medical bills for themselves by sleeping in the horrible hospital cots or recliners next to my bed. The community that I live in would make someone in my same predicament from New York appreciate the small town life. One of my ex-best friends held a banquet for me where almost the whole town came and supported my family and helped raise money for my family. Now that I shared with you how lucky and blessed I was the entire time even though that isn't the half of it I should let you know the first brain surgery was easy. Everyone complimented me on how strong and what an inspiration I was, but I didn't feel that way and still don't.
After getting out of the hospital, the hard part came. Waiting. We had to wait for the pathology report. I remember the day my mom got the phone call. She did a little dance and started talking about how I was going to have a family and get married and all this stuff because the report came back as a grade one which is not cancer and is only a calcium build up or benign. I just rolled my eyes and laughed and felt happy as well. It was all over except for a few check ups here and there.
A couple months later my check up came and I remember that every little thing that didn't feel right would worry me for a few weeks beforehand. My finger would throb and I would ask myself if it was on the right or left side of my body, if this has happened to me before, and a dozen other ridiculous questions. I couldn't help, but laugh at myself here and there. I got the MRI and we did what life is all about all over again, waited.
We eventually got a call from the doctor that let us know there was a gray spot that was there before that had grown in the two months we had waited. It was time for Brain surgery:Round two. This one wasn't so nice and easy(Anyone else think of that hair commercial right there?). When the doctor went in and it was sticky-likeand was almost pulsing, which is a sign of a high grade of cancer. I was out on the operating table when the doctor walked out to the waiting room letting my family know with a serious worried look on his face that it was bigger than he thought. I woke up and was feeling the same way I always felt after brain surgery. Tired, drugged, but content. From there, it is all a major blur. My spinal fluid started to leak out of my head because the dura(I sound a lot smarter than I am just because I know all these new fancy words from my experiences) which covers the brain under your bone, was leaking. It wasn't healing correctly which caused me to have morning, brunch, afternoon, snack, dinner, and supper sickness. I couldn't keep anything down. They resorted to lots of drugs to try and make me better as I layed down in the dark ICU. I scarred my uncle and cousins when I let them know that I couldn't believe they put a catheter in me when I couldn't even wear a tampon. I then informed my uncle he didn't have to worry about me having sex since I can't wear a tampon. I think this has become a repressed memory of his. Another family friend came and visited me and asked me if I realized my toilet was directly in front of the window. I replied with, "Well, it is the I-C-U." I don't remember saying that, but Cheryl was laughing to my mom about that a few days ago. All joking aside, my best friend told me that after she and my her mom(my second mom) came to visit after an intense basketball game I made her promise to win(She fouled out and cried because she couldn't be there for the surgery) and my mom was in tears outside the door telling them to not let me know how bad I looked because I didn't realize how bad off I was before they came in and at that point in time my second mom, Leslie, thought to herself that I could really die. After a stranger shared the love on Valentine's Day and let some of their blood run through my system, my condition started to improve, but I was still not better. I was still throwing up and tired and groggy. After I do not know how long, I was put in observation with the spaceship nurses. I call them this because they had a little space ship that my room was right outside of, but everytime I pressed the button for some tylenol, it took them hours to help me because they were to busy planning for take off back to their planet or something while I layed in bed with a headache. Mind you, I HATE pain pills and got in trouble for waiting to long for pain medication and under rating my pain all the time.
Long story short(You are probably thinking..Finally she says that!!) the doctor that was in place of my doctor that left for a vacation to Nigeria, gave me a one time dose Benadryl mix about three times in a row to stop me from throwing up. The only reason it worked is because I would fall asleep. I still remember my dad holding the blue puke bag to my mouth as I threw up which was second nature to me now as the doctor yelled at the nurses for calling him so many times while he was busy. My grandma who had flown down from Arizona was in the room while my mom was saying how she was going to go talk to him about treating his nurses like that. My grandma gave some old fashioned answer about how he does not know how treat girls and my mom's anger grew as I sat there throwing up and in between gags I told her to just leave it alone. My dad asked if she heard me and I said it again. I said Mom, just leave it alone. She calmed down, but was still on fire. The doctor was an asshole. He came in the room and we let him know that we did not want to keep taking this one time dose because...well..it is a one time dose treatment and I didn't want to risk the side effects such as loss of hearing and things. I don't know maybe I am crazy for not wanting that? My parents let him know that we were considering transfering to a different hospital because I had been there for weeks and wasn't getting any better and he was just putting me to sleep. He yelled something about how he would be happy if we left. After a day or so, we left. I was transfered to the larger hospital three hours away by ambulance. I remember laying exhausted on the bed and mumbling to my best friend, Heidi, that I would see her later when all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep until next year.
Okay..so this is where the long story short actually comes into play. We transferred to the bigger hospital and within five minutes of being there the doctor knew so much more and understood things such as me hearing the dripping noises in my head, which the doctor in Kearney said I was crazy for saying. I was better within a week or so after the went in and took about a bone plate and replaced it with titanium mesh because I had a bone infection. It had been taken out so my body thought it was a foreign object and was fighting it. I was given a PICC line, which is like a long IV that leads to my heart for antibiotics. My sister, mom, and dad, were then told that they had to become my own personal nurses for the next six weeks or so. They had to give me antibiotics through the PICC line every four hours or so. It got to the point where I could just leave school and come as I wanted. The secretary didn't care. It was pretty funny actually. All while this was happening we were still doing our favorite thing ever...waiting! Waiting for that damn pathology report to come back and assure us that what the doctor saw was just a figment of his imagination.
I remember my mom getting this phone call. I can still see her eyes tearing up and her eyebrows crinkling down forming a worried look on her face. I started to bite my nail when I realized it was the call we had been waiting for and it wasn't the news we wanted. My mom started to pace and went into a back room while the daycare kids ran around the house. I entertained myself with them while I waited for her to be done. I laughed and played as hard as I could, which is one of my ways of coping. The more sad I get, the funnier I become it seems. It helps avoid the sad puppy dog face that people give me. I hate seeing someone sad on my behalf!
Anyway, she came back in the room with a smile on her face and red rimmed eyes letting me know that the doctor called and it came back as a grade three. One grade lower than the highest. This was normally found in older patients and I found out later that I was given five years to live. That would be my twenty first birthday. This meant chemo and radiation. The chemo was easy for me and I didn't throw up that much. I liked the feeling of cutting my hair so it wasn't sad for me to cut off all my hair and have a head shaving party. I had a pretty awesome mohawk going on and some zig zag look before we finished. My dad took me to radiation and everything was good. I was tired and going through school. The teachers were super supportive and I could not have graduated with my class if it wasn't for their understanding. Did I mention how lucky I am to live the small town life?
I went through a phase where all I did was math homework. It was more like, I stared at papers with math problems and cried to myself. The first day I went back to school I got lost because they had just added a one floor addition to the school. The high school had their own wing and everything. I couldn't find my cousin who was living with me and driving my brother and I to school and "babysitting" me. I was in tears with a smile on my face trying to figure out where my cousin was in this tiny new wing of the school and when she saw me she began to laugh and so did I. We were driving back to my dad's house and my brother and cousin started to nag me about how I went back to school too soon. I got angry and told them that if I would have waited longer I would have even more catching up to do and would be even more stressed. They started to say things like they would understand, you just had brain surgery again and missed so much and it just made me angrier. They didn't understand. I had to pass my Junior year and I wasn't going to do that by sitting around waiting until I was back to one hundred and ten percent again. That is when a wall went up and my life revolved around math homework and listening to my cousin and brother laugh and giggle after school. That was when I hit a small rut, but came out of it once the summer came and I had passed my Junior year.
Well, this took longer than expected so I can not finish because unfortunately I am programmed to need this thing called sleep. It is a default of mine, I am sure some of you understand? Haha. Writing is my way of releasing my stress so this will not be the end of me. I might even make this a daily occurence, but am not promising anything.
Smile! You are beautiful and so is your life! A cancer patient told you that so if you have a beating heart you can't not listen. (Bad cancer jokes are okay, if they weren't I think I would go crazy) I am not reading this before I submit it either so I apologize for any type of grammatical errors or just flat-out nonsense paragraphs that my scatterbrain tried to form.

Goodnight!