I'm going to stay

I lay in bed in the middle of a dark Friday night. I was in a lot of pain so I couldn't sleep. I stared at the walls contemplating when my cancer was finally going to claim my life. I rolled back and forth in my bed in a futile attempt to get comfortable. My face writhed in agony as if it were being assailed by thousands of pins were constantly prodding it. The tumor had swelled over some nerves in my neck and shoulders creating a fresh sea of suffering for me to drown in. As I stared at the wall my pain began to spontaneously recede. My body began to gradually relax and my breathing evened out.

I found myself among a small meadow in a circle of redwood trees. Lying flat on my back I felt the warm glow of a pleasant afternoon sun caressing my face. There was no pain. Insects shimmered in the sunlight as they danced above my face. Like thousands of tiny prisms each insect glistered against the sunlight casting every color imaginable into the fairy circle. Sheltered by the ancient redwoods I felt an overwhelming sense of sanctuary.

As I lay in peace, the ground directly below me began to glow. The white gleam steadily grew in intensity until its radiance reached that of a gleaming star. At the culmination of the dazzling light a ray of pure white light began to ascend towards the heavens. The light was warm. It permeated through my body as easily as water flows through a stream. While the effulgence soared infinitely skyward I felt the foreign sensation of leaving my body. As the light ascended so did I. I felt the rapture of leaving my mortal shackles behind and moving on. No more pain...

It was then that I heard the voices of thousands in a choir trilling their otherworldly melody to me. I felt their message more than I really heard it. Come with me. Come with us. I felt the ethereal message chime through my conscious in an infinite flow as I rose toward the sanctuary of the heavens. Too overwhelmed by bliss to think, I let the light take me.

A diminutive utterance somewhere in the deep corners of my mind was screaming. I tried to block it out to no avail. How was I to delight in my current euphoria with the vexation of responsibility to some vague recollection of influence? The cold sensation of ambiguity was raising its ugly head flooding my mind with reason. I'm not done yet, I thought. Stay. The words became my resurgence. I'm going to stay. I rallied my strength and resisted the sweet draw of the voices.

I felt myself slam back into my body. I felt the screaming pain in my face. Exhaustion poured over me in a wave and my shoulder shrieked in agony. I opened my eyes to see I was back in my room. Darkness shrouded my tangled bed coverings. I turned over to see the unlit outline of my brother sleeping in a chair beside my bed. It was then that I noticed that I was still speaking the words "I'm going to stay."

The beginning

When I was 12 years old I was a physical titan. I was on the basketball team, the tennis team, the volleyball team, the track team and I also took martial arts classes on the side. I was at the peak of my athletic ability at twelve years old. I was bigger and stronger than most of the other kids my age and I enjoyed dishing out subtle reminders to my peers to maintain a distinguished social status. In the fall of 2001 I started getting double vision and headaches. These symptoms were subtle at first but gradually increased. My friends started to notice that I was getting somehow slower. Eventually the headaches were getting so painful that I was passing out for brief moments throughout the day. I thought “they are just growing pains. Stop being a wuss. Everyone else has to deal with them, you’re just being weak.” It wasn’t until my parents and other observers began noticing that I was seeing double that we went to see an optometrist. I saw two of everything. I would shoot a basket and depending on which basket I shot at I would score a point. When playing tennis I saw two balls coming at me and had a 50/50 chance of hitting the real one. There were a lot of interesting situations like this and finally it was time for that dreaded trip to the eye doctor. Nothing could have possibly been worse. I was going to have to get glasses! People were going to think I looked like such a dork in glasses. When I got to the optometrist though, he told us that I had perfect 20/20 vision in each eye...

Long story short, the optometrist was curious so he sent me to an ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist dilated my eyes and concluded that I had a swollen optic nerve and told me to get an MRI. I was at Sonoma State University watching a college girls volleyball game with my friends when my parents walked in looking grim. They took me out of the bleachers with no explanation and forcibly ushered my into the dark parking lot. I knew I was in big trouble but I couldn’t think of what I had done for such harsh punishment. I was in more trouble than I could have ever imagined but it wasn’t the kind of trouble I was suspecting. I had a tumor growing inside the fourth ventricle in my brain. We rushed to the nearest emergency room and the doctor on call looked at the MRI. He told us that this kind of tumor was inoperable and that I had about two more weeks to live. Naturally I was upset. That night we took an ambulance to a hospital in San Francisco and the doctors there gave us much more optimistic chances of survival. I was transferred to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and in November 2001 I had brain surgery. The tumor was successfully removed after a nine hour surgery and I was ok (well, as okay as one can be after brain surgery). Then came the really bad news: I had six weeks of intense radiation “therapy” to the head and spine followed by two years of heavy chemotherapy. The next two years were what I imagine would make hell seem like a day spa.

I was about 18 before I had recovered from the treatments (and when I say recovered I mean about 85% of where I was). I was like the trophy survival child down at Lucile Packard. The doctors were downright giddy when they saw how good my body had responded to the treatment. I was totally cancer free until January 2010. Then low and behold I got another visit from my old friend double vision. An MRI revealed that something I had something foreign in my right sphenoid sinus cavity. The doctors didn’t know what it was. After a cranial surgery that I can’t remember the name of, they took a sample of the tumor. The biopsy revealed that the tumor was in fact a stage 4 sarcoma, a very rare, aggressive tumor that usually arises from previous radiation treatment. Because of its location among many vital nerve clusters the tumor was deemed inoperable by the tumor board. My only option was an experimental radiation protocol which involved six weeks, six days a week, two times a day of radiation to the tumor site. Would that cure the tumor? Would that shrink the tumor? Would that even stop the tumor from growing? “Maybe” was the answer on all of the accounts.

Do I want to try using the perpetrator of the cancer to try an cure it... That really just seems like a no brainer to me. On the other hand lets say it does work and it shrinks the tumor a bit. Do I want to extend my life for x amount of months feeling sick and victimized from radiation treatments? The answer is no, not really. This by no means entails that I am surrendering to death. It simply means that I am going to go about fighting the cancer a different way.