In late August of 2013, I started college at University of the Pacific as a normal-ish 17-year-old girl. On September 8, 2013, I became an 18-year-old Hodgkin's Lymphoma patient. My oncologists called it the "best of the worst case scenario." No part of cancer or chemotherapy is easy, and neither was putting these feelings on paper, so to speak, but I feel they need to be said. This is how it feels to be a cancer patient.

It's terrifying.

So many questions went through my head when I was first diagnosed, most of all, "What's going to happen to me?" It wasn't so much a worry of whether I was going to live or die, but a matter of what my quality of life would be like both during and after chemotherapy. When I first got to UCSF Medical Center on Sunday, September 8, 2013, the doctors were terrified for me. I didn't know it at the time, but I was dying. I remember needing an oxygen tube, and that my resting heart rate was somewhere around 127 beats per minute. I went through many tests, one of them being a CT. My parents got to see those scans. They told me, "It looks like there's a loaf of bread sitting on your chest." My tumor was under my ribs, squishing my heart and left lung. Had I not gone in when I did, I probably would have stopped breathing in the middle of the night and died. But I did and, once they biopsied a lymph node and diagnosed me, I was on track to becoming a survivor. Cancer is terrifying.

It's worrying.

I wasn't really worried about myself so much as I worried about my parents. At the time, President Obama's Affordable Healthcare Act was going into effect, and I had heard horror stories of cancer patients losing their healthcare. My parents were well off, and we sat comfortably in the upper middle class, but I wasn't sure my parents could afford my treatment if we lost our insurance. I remember sitting in the hospital that first week with my mom beside me, asking her if we were going to lose our health insurance. She was very reassuring, and I was quickly talked out of that worry, but there were other things to fret over, too. I worried about my parents, and how they were taking the news. Their only child had cancer. How awful. I couldn't imagine. I worried more about my friends and family, and how they were doing, than I worried about myself. I knew how I was doing. I knew what my future looked like, and while it wasn't what I expected, let alone wanted, it was predictable. I watched my mom cry the day I was diagnosed. I watched my dad fight back tears, telling me post-chemo that he felt he had to be strong for me. My parents are the strongest, most courageous people I've ever met, and I strive to be that unbreakable. Cancer causes pain and worry, even in the patient.

It's angering.

"Why me?" ran through my head on a daily basis. A couple months into chemotherapy, I began having anxiety nausea. This meant that whenever I went into the outpatient clinic for my appointments, I would immediately get nauseous. This nausea stems from the vomiting caused by the chemotherapy. Your body begins to expect and predict it, and act on it before the vomit-inducing thing even occurs. Just like everything relating to cancer, it's awful. About two months in, I had surgery to put in a port, which was basically just a simpler way to get the chemo into my body without an external tube or having to get a catheter placed every other week. During my post-op stay, I stayed in a double room with a girl named Sam. Sam is my twin. She's my birthday twin, born exactly three years after me on the same day. She's also my cancer twin, having just that day been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Stage II. That next morning, having gotten chemo the night before, I was puking my guts out in the bathroom screaming, "I HATE THIS!" at the top of my lungs. That was the norm during post-chemo vomiting. Poor Sam got a good, hard look at what the next few months had in store for her. I was angry. I was angry not only that I had to go through this, but that my friends and family did, as well. I was even angrier that someone as kind and gentle as Sam had to suffer through it, too. Cancer makes you so damn angry.

It's horrifying.

I was 18 for three days when I was diagnosed. Because I was just barely legal, and because my lymphoma was "adolescent," whatever that means, I was in Pediatric Oncology. Peds Onc isn't so bad, really, except that it's awful. So. Many. Children. So many sick children. Being 18 meant understanding what was happening to me, understanding that, if I wanted to live, if I wanted to make it to 19, I had to do these things, suffer through this treatment. These children didn't have that. Most of the kids I saw were under eight years old. I once watched a maybe-four-year-old walk in with his mom. Poor kid had numbing cream on the backs of both hands and the inside of both elbows. He was walking like a zombie, arms straight out in front of him, looking around like he had no idea of the pain that was coming. Numbing cream, from what I understand, was only used when you were going to get poked. Four different patches of numbing cream on a four-year-old? That screwed me up. Later into chemo, once I had established a rhythm with my nurse, Stella, I began to have chemo in the same room every other Monday. To my horror, so did a child of maybe six years. Halfway through my two-hour chemo, the screaming would start. "NO! MOMMY IT HURTS! DON'T LET THEM, MOMMY, IT HURTS! STOP IT!" I'll never know if it was a boy or a girl-- it really doesn't matter-- but that poor kid's screams were more traumatizing than anything cancer could throw at me. I still have nightmares about those screams. Cancer is horrifying.

It's relieving.

Finally, I knew what was happening to my body. You see, about a week after I moved into my dorm room, my roommate and I came back from a school-sponsored trip, and I promptly noticed a bump on my neck that hadn't been there before. It felt like a speed bump-- sudden and unnatural.

Looking in the mirror, I said to my roommate, Darion, "Uhhh... could you feel this? Does my neck feel weird to you?"

With a look on her face that clearly meant I was insane, she replied, "Dude, I don't know what your neck feels like!"

The next two weeks, more symptoms popped up out of nowhere: coughing, night sweats, lethargy. I developed a rash of bright, red, angry welts from my newly-pierced belly button up to my swollen thyroid. I thought it would scar, but thankfully, there are no scars in sight. Well, not from the rash, anyway. While that diagnosis of Stage II Hodgkin's Lymphoma was horrifying and terrible, while it angered and worried me to no end, in the end, it was a relief. I knew what was wrong with me. I no longer had to question it. The doctors knew how to take care of me, and I would survive. Any diagnosis when you know something is wrong is an utter relief.

And now...

After six months of chemotherapy, I was declared cancer-free, and have been in remission for three years as of February 2017. I'm back at University of the Pacific in my junior year and working on my B.A. in English. Sam has been in remission for three years as of May 2017, and is a healthy, happy 18-year-old. We remain friends on Facebook, and we wish each other happy birthday every year. To this day, Darion remains one of my best friends, and we often laugh at the memory of my swollen neck.

Special thank you to Stella, my incredible nurse in the outpatient clinic, Dr. Tulpule and Dr. Goldsby, my amazing oncologists, as well as every other nurse, doctor, and staff member who works tirelessly to provide the best care for their patients at UCSF Medical Center. I wouldn't be here without you.