It’s a powerful word, the C-word. It can devastate and destroy, but also unite. Its mere utterance can change lives.
It changed mine. And three years later, it would change Nick’s. But let’s get back to me here… haha.
The C-word. I’m not talking about a “bad” word, like cunt or crap or crackwhore. And yet, it is a bad word. It’s a horrible, debilitating word.
I’m talking about cancer.
The first time I heard that word used in reference to me, I had just turned twenty. I was relishing in the realization that I was no longer a teenager and less than eleven months shy of legal drinking age. Almost through my sophomore year of college, and I thought I was ready to be an adult. I’d already signed a lease on an apartment with three friends for the fall and was anxious to move out of the dorm and truly live “on my own.” Cook my own food, pay my own bills, do whatever I wanted to without having to answer to an RA.
I didn’t realize how quickly the change from “kid” to “adult” would come. That, in the time it took to utter a two-syllable word, a mere heartbeat, I would grow up. That, suddenly, I would be faced with problems far scarier than bills and cooking and the wrath of the RA on my dorm floor.
In those last few days of innocence (even though I wasn’t all that innocent), I didn’t realize.
The symptoms had been around for awhile by then. At first, they seemed like nothing. April’s a rough month for college kids, with spring break a mere memory and a week of finals standing in the way of summer vacation. I thought I was just burned out, exhausted from trying to balance my course load with my social life. It seemed a reasonable problem to have; I was a good student, but I also liked to hang out with my friends, and there were many weekends where I barely saw my dorm, only crawling back to it after waking up with a massive hangover in the apartment of some junior I knew only through my roommate. So it was nothing new to me to feel sleep-deprived and stressed, but this kind of fatigue was beyond anything I’d ever felt before. There were days when just walking across the Quad to class felt like wading a mile through taffy.
And then there were the bruises. Mysterious bruises that just sort of popped up in random places all over my body. My roommate teased me about them at first; she’d spot a particularly nasty one on my thigh and ask what I’d bumped into, and when I would tell her that I didn’t know, she would laugh and ask, “Man, how drunk were you??” Like I hinted at earlier, I was no saint when it came to drinking, so I figured she was right – I must have just tripped or knocked into something over the weekend.
But then I stopped going out on the weekends, because I was too tired. I’d go to bed at eight or nine o’clock, in hopes I could sleep off the fatigue, and I’d wake up at seven the next morning feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, and with a crop of new bruises I couldn’t explain. I started to think maybe I’d been sleepwalking, but Jenn, my roommate, said she’d never seen or heard me do any such thing. Then again, Jenn was the deepest sleeper I’d ever met, so I didn’t put too much trust in her word. I could have pole-vaulted from my bed to hers and landed right on top of her, and she still wouldn’t have woken up.
It all came to a head the night Jenn dragged me to a party, insisting that I just needed a night of fun to de-stress myself, and I passed out. I don’t really remember it happening; all I know is that one minute, I was sitting on a bar stool in this guy’s apartment, and the next, I was on the floor with a bunch of concerned faces hovering over me. “How much did she have to drink?” one person asked another, and the scary thing was, I was totally sober.
But totally sober, perfectly healthy college students don’t just randomly pass out at parties, nor do they gush blood from small cuts. Apparently I had clunked my head on the counter pretty good when I’d fallen off my stool. The cut at my temple wasn’t big, nor deep, but it bled. A lot. After it had soaked through the towel someone gave me, Jenn, white and clammy (she never could stand the sight of blood), had suggested someone call an ambulance for me. That didn’t go over well, as the guy who was hosting the party was afraid the cops would come if the paramedics did, and there were way too many drunk minors around. I backed him up there, mostly because I was humiliated and didn’t want to attract any more attention to myself by being taken away in an ambulance. I didn’t need all of that anyway; it was just a little cut.
But the little cut kept bleeding, so finally someone volunteered to drive me to the emergency room, saying I probably needed stitches. “Don’t worry,” the girl told me on the way, “if you haven’t had anything to drink, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’ll just say you tripped over something and fell.”
I was worried, but not about being busted for underage drinking. The blood didn’t bother me, but the way I felt did. Something wasn’t right. I was sure of that now, even if I didn’t want to admit it.
I got two stitches in my head that night. As the doctor told me my blood wouldn’t clot and that I might be anemic, I also got an IV full of platelets. And that’s where it all began.
That ER resident, though young, had seen all of the warning signs in me and admitted me to the hospital for testing. It was the first time I’d ever had to stay in the hospital overnight, but it definitely wouldn’t be the last. It was probably a good thing I didn’t realize it at the time.
April 22, 2000
The whole thing seemed surreal. Me in a hospital bed, looking around a hospital room, waiting with my parents for the doctor whose visit had been promised by one of the nurses. “Dr. Rodrigo is on her way to discuss your test results.”
It sounded serious, and I guess that’s what made it surreal. A part of me was still in denial that anything could be really wrong with me. I’d never been sick a day of my life, with the exception of the usual colds and flus and the chickenpox when I was seven. But here I was in the hospital, having been put through blood tests and scans and horrible procedures where they’d shoved needles into my back. And my parents were here. And this Dr. Rodrigo, who had taken over once I’d been admitted to the hospital, was some kind of specialist, though no one had told me what kind. That pissed me off, come to think of it. I would have to ask her when she came.
But then she came, and I didn’t get the chance because she started talking first, and I knew better than to interrupt.
“Claire, would you like your parents to stay while I talk to you?” asked Dr. Rodrigo in her soft, Spanish-accented voice.
I hadn’t really even considered the fact that I could make them leave – confidentiality and all that jazz – but I nodded my head yes. I wanted them to stay. I didn’t keep secrets from my parents. Well, that wasn’t really true – I’d done tons of things they didn’t know about and I didn’t want them to know about, but this was different. I didn’t keep secrets about important things, and I could tell, by the serious tone of her voice, that this was important.
How important, I didn’t realize. I thought she was going to say I was anemic, which totally made sense, based on my symptoms. I had started to convince myself of that yesterday, during the blood transfusion. My roommate Jenn was anemic, and she was skinny and pale and got nosebleeds a lot, which I took to be the equivalent of my bleeding head wound the night before. It wasn’t a big deal, though; she took an iron supplement everyday, and she was perfectly fine. I would just need to start doing the same thing, and I would be too. And then we’d have something else in common, besides fair skin, which we could now blame on anemia.
In a moment of insanity, while thinking of my pale skin, I studied Dr. Rodrigo and thought about how vastly different she looked from me. She was dark – dark hair, dark eyes, tan skin, obviously from some Spanish-speaking country, though I didn’t know which. And I was light – red hair, blue eyes, and white, freckly skin that never tanned and always burned, thanks to my Irish ancestry. I wished I looked more like her… and that I spoke with a cute accent, the way she did.
I was so lost in this train of thought that, at first, I didn’t realize she had started talking about the test results. Suddenly, I snapped back to reality.
“Dr. Conti, the ER physician who saw you yesterday, had some suspicions when he had you admitted. Unfortunately, the tests confirm his suspicions. They point to a diagnosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia. It’s a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow.”
In keeping with the trend of surrealism, her words didn’t sink in right away. I’m not sure how many seconds I sat there, frozen, not moving, not blinking, not even breathing. It was my dad’s hand on top of mine that snapped me out of this, and then the reaction came.
Except that I didn’t know how to react.
Cancer… leukemia… I have leukemia?
Somehow, it just didn’t seem possible. When I thought of leukemia, I thought of those bald little kids you saw on the telethons on TV. That couldn’t be me. I was twenty years old. I was in college, getting ready to finish the semester and move into my apartment. I couldn’t have what those poor kids on TV had.
“I thought it was anemia.” The words slipped out of my mouth quite calmly, which surprised me. Had I just said that? I felt weird, almost like I was outside of my body, watching this scene play out.
“You are anemic, but it’s because of the leukemia. It interferes with the production of blood cells, and as a result, your blood counts are abnormal. That was why your cut bled so much.”
She was making too much sense; I didn’t like it. This couldn’t be possible… it just couldn’t be.
Then a little sob escaped my mom’s throat, startling me. Shaken, I leaned forward to look past my dad to her. Her hand was over her mouth, her eyes wide and misted over. Between us, my dad sat very stiffly, his hand still clamped over mine. He didn’t move, just stared straight ahead at Dr. Rodrigo, his eyes narrowed. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, but then he spoke, sounding as calm as I had. Maybe I got that from him.
“You’re absolutely sure about this?” he asked.
Dr. Rodrigo nodded slowly. “Unfortunately, yes. I wouldn’t give you this diagnosis unless I was sure. I know this is very hard news, but there is good news. This is the most common type of leukemia in young people Claire’s age, and when treated aggressively, it can be cured. Now that we’ve diagnosed it, we can progress with treatment.”
“Will she need chemotherapy?”
“Chemo is the standard protocol, yes.”
I wasn’t sure why my dad was asking all the questions I should have been asking, but I was grateful. I must have had all kinds of questions somewhere in the back of my mind, but they seemed to be locked back there for now. I couldn’t think. All I could do was repeat that word in my head. Cancer.
With it came another C-word: change.
I may not have realized it at the time, or maybe I did, also somewhere in the back of my mind, but that was the moment that my entire life changed.
