Personal Narrative: Bone Cancer Changed My Life

I have never been the kind of person that knows what they are supposed to be. While that is certainly not a unique condition, I have felt at times that my uncertainty was to an almost comical degree. As a kid, I tried dozens of sports and was successful at approximately zero of them. In an effort to get me to do something, my parents put me in art classes, science camps, sports leagues, and other kinds of activities we could barely afford, but none of them stuck. With little exaggeration, I feel like I was in every activity and program offered to under-twelve lower-middle class children. However, there was a point when all of these activities came to an unsettling halt. In what I like to describe as, “the only interesting thing that has ever
At seven years old, I was taking daily trips to San Francisco for the worst possible reason. As my family was dealing with my grandmother’s devastating Multiple Myeloma, a bone cancer, I had to come along and make things more complicated. To clarify, the cancer I had was not life threatening and I never had chemotherapy nor radiation, but nonetheless it was a significant event. Even if eight year old me did not realize it, I had cancer, and it had an enormous impact. Until recently, I could comprehend the implications of something so serious. Besides the expected dislike for hospitals and the doctor, my experience gave too abrupt a realization that I think a second-grader should have. Even though I spent most of my time in the children's’ area of the hospital, there was the occasional test or scan that took me to the less kid-friendly areas. Sparing the excessive morbidity, I was exposed to death. It was everywhere, and I knew it. Walking down the sterile halls, wheeling around the pole that carried the bag which featured the IV comfortably in my wrist, I saw the gaunt faces of