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My 19th birthday was the worst day of my life.
Riding with my mom through Miami rush-hour traffic, I quietly tried to move my right leg. I leaned forward and willed it to shift with my eyes, but it was stubborn. I told myself it was all in my head.
I had spent the morning in clinic getting a steady stream of drugs into my blood to treat my lymphoma. For five months, I’d been feeling the visceral waves of nausea that come with chemotherapy, and at this point, they were bad but also reassuring – the chemicals were in me, devastating my manic T-cells with broad strokes that also weakened the rest of my body.
I was diagnosed shortly after I graduated from high school. I had just begun summer classes at Florida State University when a few subtle but persistent symptoms emerged: loss of appetite and a cough that would not go away. I also had some pain in my lungs when I turned in bed. I later found out this was because the tumor behind my sternum was blocking the fluids in my lungs from draining, and the bag of tissue that lines the organ had swelled up.
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