Surviving Cancer, Surviving Romance

My surgery was set for April Fools’ Day 2010. I wished the diagnosis had been some sort of elaborate prank, but I knew none of my friends would be jumping out and yelling, “April Fools!” I was nervous. Random thoughts swirled around in my head: “What if I can never play sports again? When they cut me open, what happens if it’s worse than what they initially thought? Will the cute blonde girl in my English class ever go out with me after news spreads about my cancerous testicle?”

As they wheeled me down the hall at USMD Hospital at Arlington, I couldn’t hold back my tears. They rolled down my face. I could hear them as they dropped off and hit the warm sheets near my ear.

The surgery was about a four-hour procedure. The surgeon removed my cancerous testicle, and when I woke up, I was in excruciating pain in my groin, where he had gone in to remove the testicle. I would be out of sports and working out for a month while I healed. I felt mad because of the pain I was in and sad that I now felt alone because none of my friends had cancer and did not know what I was going through.

On the day I was supposed to return to school, I broke down. I hadn’t slept much in the four days since the surgery. I was in tremendous pain. I was irritable and scared. Life seemed unfair. I cried and told my mother I couldn’t take it anymore, that I was going to quit and give up the fight. I would live out my final months in suffering. I had never felt that kind of physical and emotional pain before. I couldn’t move around because of the pain from the incision in my groin. I could go to bed only on my back, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee that the pain would be manageable enough for me to sleep.

“I’m done,” I told my mom. “I’m ending the fight. I’m going to live out my final months and just be miserable.”

I didn’t think I was cut out for what the next few months were going to bring –– months of chemo, more surgeries, all the time I would spend in the hospital and away from my friends, all the school work I would be missing.

My mom sat me down and told me words I’ll never forget: “You are a fighter,” she said. “Don’t you ever forget that. God has a special plan for you. He knows you can do this. This is just a temporary roadblock.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes, shouldered my backpack, and was ready to rejoin school and the fight for life.

My mind raced while driving to school. I had e-mailed all of my teachers, telling them that I was operated on for cancer and to tell my fellow classmates what was going on with me. I still didn’t know what I was going to say to them. Telling my teenage classmates about getting my junk surgically modified wasn’t going to be easy. I knew they would have questions for me. I still wasn’t sure how they would react.

I stepped inside the school and was met with a tremendous amount of support. My friends gave me their notes, my teachers put in extra hours to tutor me and catch me up on what I had missed or would be missing. They wanted to make sure that I would be able to make it to my senior year, with the ultimate goal of graduating on time.

Things were going to be all right.

Or so I thought.

A few short weeks later, I began chemotherapy, feeling a little more at ease about everything. My doctor told me that I would have no dietary restrictions. For someone who loves food, that was a relief. I was going to breeze through chemo with no problems at all. In no time I would be back on my feet.

Boy, was I wrong. Anyone who says chemo is easy? I don’t know how they do it.

Chemotherapy knocked me on my butt. I was constantly drowsy, nauseous, and by the time I got to my third and final round, I was vomiting a lot. But it was all a process, and if I wanted to get better and get back to feeling normal, I had to endure the hardships.

My doctor suggested that I go on a homebound program and be homeschooled while I underwent treatment. I shot that idea down. There was no way that I was going to miss more of my junior year than I already had. I also figured that if I withdrew, people would really think that something was wrong with me. I didn’t want that. I wanted them to think I was strong and prevailing.

Kaitlyn visited me in the hospital while I was on my second round of chemo. I was super-excited. She was with a few of her friends, who were visiting someone else in the hospital. Kaitlyn stopped by my room and stayed for about an hour. We talked about school and small stuff. I wanted to ask her out to dinner for when I got out of the hospital, but I wasn’t sure she would say yes. I worried that she might feel obligated to say yes. Otherwise she would look like a jerk for turning down a sick cancer patient. Also, I was sick, bald, and looked like complete crap.

I have regretted not asking her out ever since.

In between rounds of chemo, I returned to school ready to focus on catching up on my studies and trying to live as normal a life as possible. I was sitting in class one day, and I turned my head to look at the board. When I looked back, a chunk of hair was sitting on my spiral notebook. The more days that passed, the more my hair began to fall out. I began to get emotional. On top of chemo treatments, dashed athletic dreams, and stymied romantic ambitions, I was going to be bald, too?

I couldn’t take it anymore. It was bad enough that I couldn’t be a normal teenage boy, but now I was going to have to walk around and have people gawk at me.

Any chance I thought I had with Kaitlyn or any other girl, I figured, would go out the window. My body was changing. I was dropping weight because food made me nauseous, and now with no hair on my head, my confidence went out the window. I felt like a freak. There was no way I could ask out this girl whom I had been crushing on for a couple of months now. I had zero confidence.

I took on my final two rounds of chemo in May and June at Cook Children’s hospital in Fort Worth. I endured the intense nausea and vomiting but didn’t feel like the treatments were helping at all. I was upset. And sad. Upset that I was getting sick every day, sad because I felt like a freak.

Many nights in the hospital, I sat there crying because my emotions were running high. I felt helpless, but deep down I knew that if I wanted to get better, this was just temporary.

June 4, 2010: my last day of chemo. I wanted to scream and jump for joy. Finally, it was over. I could get back to living a normal life. I was ready to hear those words that every cancer patient wants to hear. Only I didn’t.

“The chemo killed most of the cells, but there are still some cancer cells in there that the chemo didn’t kill,” the doctor said.

My heart sank because unfortunately there isn’t a test to determine live or dead cancer cells. So I had two choices. I could have another surgery to remove the cells, or I could be done, the cells would stay in there, and I would just have to take the chance that they weren’t live.

Retroperitoneal lymph node dissection: I had never heard of that. I did my research and found out that the surgery is uncommon here in the United States. What a comforting thought. How on earth was I going to find a doctor who knew how to do the surgery?

The first one I found was “cut happy.” At our meeting, he pulled up a diagram of the human body and pointed out where he could cut into me. It made me feel like I was the patient in the game Operation. Not quite the doctor I wanted treating me. Luckily, the next doctor we found was calming, funny, and helped me feel better about everything.

Before I went in for surgery, I was able to complete and earn the highest Boy Scouts honor –– the Eagle Scout. I was so relieved to earn it, considering that three months earlier I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to obtain it. You have only until your 18th birthday, and I kept procrastinating. In some ways, I considered cancer a blessing in disguise because while I was at home recovering, I was able to just sit down and knock out the remaining requirements.

My second and final surgery was on July 31. This one was crazy. A three- to four-hour surgery turned into a nine-hour procedure because the cancer cells that were in my abdomen had latched on to my aorta, leading to my heart. I woke up from surgery with the biggest stomachache in the world. I looked at my stomach and saw a zipper of a scar, with staples in there. Even though I was still groggy from anesthesia, for whatever reason I wanted to touch it. I was in the hospital for a week and put on dietary restrictions because all of my stomach muscles had been cut and organs had been moved so the surgeon and his team could get to my lymph nodes –– conveniently located in the back of my abdomen. After surgery, the cells were sent for testing and luckily for me, the cancer cells were dead, so I wouldn’t have to go through more chemotherapy.

August 17, 2010: I was finally able to hear the words that I had been longing to hear. “You are cancer free!” I felt on top of the world after months of going through hell and back. I could finally be normal again. My hair was slowly starting to grow back, I was starting to gain the weight I had lost from chemo, and, most importantly, I was gaining confidence.

A week later, that feeling of being on top of the world was shattered. Suddenly, I could not eat or drink anything. Every time I did, I would throw it right back up. It was awful. I was taken back into the emergency room, and they ran some tests. I potentially had appendicitis as a result of the surgery that I had just had. I really did not want to have a third surgery. Further tests revealed no appendicitis, but they still could not figure out the cause of my vomiting. It was later determined that my illness was a result of my colon and some other major organs being moved, and I was released from the hospital and ready to start my senior year on time.

My senior year started smoothly. I was getting back in the flow of things, trying to return to a “normal” lifestyle. Every time I saw Kaitlyn in the hall, I would say hi to her, maybe slip a corny joke in there about school or whatever came to mind, but I still couldn’t ask her out. Somehow I just couldn’t imagine her wanting to date me after everything, so I just went about my business wondering every day if my mind would change about asking her out.

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