16. It was a blessing in disguise.
“While I’m not a cancer survivor, my mom is. She had cervical cancer and knew something was wrong when her abdomen was tender and her period was a really bright red. When she went for a doctor visit, they couldn’t find anything and decided a hysterectomy would be the best decision.
While performing the surgery, they had to stop when they found the early stage 3 tumors. A nurse later told her that after her incident, they completely changed how they checked for cervical cancer. It was actually relieving to know that some people would benefit from my mom’s misfortune. It’s now been 6 years and she’s been declared officially ‘cancer free.'”
17. Living on borrowed time.
“Well the back-aches began about 14 years ago, and got progressively worse, to the point of excruciating pain. An MRI revealed a tumor had eaten a large part of one vertebra and was compressing my spinal cord. Surgery corrected the damage, but they found myeloma, which is an invariably fatal cancer of the immune system. It was successfully treated, but relapse is just a matter of WHEN’ not ‘IF.’ I live on borrowed time…”
18. That’s one hell of a camping trip
“The way I found out in a roundabout way, is kind of a funny, light-hearted story that ended up being scary!
So, I went on a camping trip and found out when we got there that my friends were setting me and this tall guy with a mohawk up for the weekend…we fell right into their trap! We enjoyed a sweaty, drunk hookup every night during our camping trip, but the sex led to some weird bruises on my body that would just not go away. The most concerning one was about the size of a sand dollar on my calf from a bite (lol). It was dark black/purple for about a month.
Finally, I went to the doctor who did a blood test and recommended I go to a hematologist/oncologist, just in case because my numbers were way out of whack. My first appointment with the hematologist sent me directly to the hospital for an ultrasound of my neck, where there was a ‘nodule’ on each side of my thyroid; 8mm on the right and 19mm on the left.
The next step was a biopsy, but that was inconclusive…go figure. The ENT specialist decided to be cautious and take the whole thyroid out. Sure thing, there were giant nodules of cancer.
I have been cancer free for a while now! Oh and for the record- I’m living with that tall guy with a mohawk now and we’ve been happily together for over a year. He discovered my cancer and got me through everything it took, he’s literally a life saver!
19. A tennis ball sized tumor.
“I couldn’t talk. I mean I wasn’t able to talk. Like when you think about a nice sentence to say, you want to say it, but…you can’t. Nobody knew it because I thought it was part of my puberty or something like that. One day my parents noticed and got worried. It was a tennis ball-sized tumor squeezing the ‘talking part’ of my brain.
After a year of 5 operations (all 5-10 hours, chemo and radiotherapy, I am now fully cured.”
20. 2-Time cancer surviving champ!
“I am both a Leukemia and a Testicular Cancer survivor.
Leukemia: I woke up and my hip joints were so swollen, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was 7 and called out for help.
I had done years of chemo and was still having follow-up treatments for side effects of the chemo and radiation. Then one day, I got a note in the mail from my cancer doctors, who did my Leukemia, saying I needed to come in for an immediate check up as a blood test had detected elevated alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) levels. It was Testicular Cancer.
They said, ‘You relapsed and it’s in your testes. We can try chemo and hope it goes into remission again, or chemo and radiation but you won’t be able to have kids.’ I was 9 and opted for chemo and radiation.”