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It is hard not to speak in cliches about cancer. It can be even harder not to feel as if I have to live up to those cliches. I sometimes feel a deep sense of guilt for not doing a better job of making lemonade out of metaphorical lemons.
Getting diagnosed with cancer at 22 really magnified the in-betweenness that I felt. All of my friends were starting careers and going to parties and dating, and I was stuck - literally - in this one hospital bed for weeks on end.
I think another aspect of being a young adult with cancer is that most of your friends, hopefully, you know, have never had to experience life-threatening illnesses themselves.
There's no denying that cancer is a gloomy subject. We repeat positive phrases to ourselves as a sort of mantra. And while positive thinking alone can't cure cancer, attitude is critical to getting through the process and growing as a person.
When you are talking to a dog about cancer, there are no judgments or taboos.
I think often when we talk about things like cancer, the kind of final act at the end of the story comes with a cure. But we don't talk a lot about what happens after. And it took me a while to even acknowledge to myself how much I was struggling.
Growing up, I had always been an avid bookworm and a straight-A student. I approached my cancer the same way I approached writing my senior thesis in college: I buried my head in research journals, interviewed experts and scoured the Internet for information.
Cancer can catch even the best of us off guard. Sometimes the emotions come pouring out. Sometimes they stay locked inside.
The hero's journey is, you know, one of the oldest story arcs that we have. And it's one, I think, that's especially projected onto cancer patients.
For cancer patients like me, and for others who suffer from chronic or life-threatening illnesses, natural disasters don't put health on the back burner.
Cancer makes people think about mortality. It scares your friends and family. And many cancer patients, consciously or otherwise, try to buffer bad news with a dose of positivity.
At the age of 22, I began to consider my own mortality. It had never occurred to me that, with all of the progress that has been made in cancer research, none of the standard treatments would work for me.
Cancer didn't have to be permanent; in my case, I'm lucky that my cancer is curable, but infertility was. And it was the first time I realized that cancer wasn't just something seasonal; it wasn't something that was going to pass with the summer. It was something that was going to change my life forever.
It took me a long time to be able to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that: A cancer patient.
And I had this sense, even though I couldn't quite wrap my head around what it meant to have a cancer diagnosis at 22, that the person I'd been before was buried, there was no returning to that pre diagnosis itself.
Having cancer changed the way I ate and thought about food. My symptoms dictated my eating habits. The sores in my mouth and the bouts of nausea, for instance, stole the pleasure of eating and made it an ordeal. At some points in my treatment, eating wasn't even an option.
I'll never go so far to call cancer a gift. It's a really terrible disease. It's taken the lives of so many of my fellow friends in the oncology unit. But like any life-interrupted moment, there are silver linings.
Black money is a cancer in our economic system, not yet terminal or life-threatening.
That was just kind of a surprise when the doctor said, 'We did a biopsy on your appendix, and you have cancer.'
When they told me I had cancer - a very rare form called appendiceal cancer - I was shocked. But I went straight into battle mode. Every morning, I'd wake up and have an internal conversation with cancer. 'All right, dude,' I'd tell it, 'go ahead and hit me. But I'm going to hit you back even harder.'
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