I was born with liver cancer, or so my dad says. He also said that I was diagnosed when I was two years old, and also says that I almost died. The one time my father talked about my cancer, was when he was telling the story of how I was diagnosed to a new doctor of mine when I was a teenager – as a baby, I had stopped eating for some reason, and when my parents brought me to the doctor thinking it was some virus or a bowel obstruction or whatever, it turns out I was extremely jaundiced while vomiting and crying constantly, which are keys symptoms of liver cancer.
Today, I remember nothing about the experience – I was too young. For the longest time, I thought it was normal to have “a line” AKA my scar on my stomach, where I had surgery as a baby. As a kid, I would tell classmates that I had cancer, and when they asked me what it was, I always said “it means that you’re very sick!” even now, when I tell people, I always get surprised looks and sympathies, to which I say “it’s whatever. I don’t even remember it”.
So, I was curious, and decided to look into what having cancer as a kid really does to you. Not only could the process of all the drugs and radiation misalign you psychologically, but gave an increased risk of heart disease, lung damage, and “secondary cancer,” where the cancer resurfaces in the same or even different organs. Looking at the marks it leaves behind is even scarier than thinking that I went through such an ordeal in the first place.
Even now, I don’t think I quite understand the implications of what it means to have cancer. I know that thousands of people die from cancer each year, and yet, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just… something that “happens”. That people probably live through it, no matter how horrendous the process is.
Before I was born, my grandmother passed away from pancreatic cancer. When I was a kid, my neighbor had leukemia, and his mother passed away from breast cancer. When I was a little older, my math teacher’s sister passed away from a brain tumor. Cancer is, in and of itself, the worst disease imaginable – it’s victims are commonplace and seemingly random, and your body is growing in a mutated out-of-control way, and the only way to stop it is to destroy your body in almost the same capacity.
Even though I don’t remember my process to recovery, I’m still afraid of what my future holds. Although my surgery removed two-thirds of my liver (which, amazingly, does grow back), I still have never been drunk, though not for lack of trying. I wonder if getting drunk from time to time will give me the same liver disease that left me in and out of hospitals for years, or worse.
The best you can do, I suppose, is to take cautionary steps. Like many things that I’m sure you all can relate to, we can never truly grasp the gravity of a situation until it happens again, and, hopefully, I and survivors like me won’t ever have to.
