As many are preparing for Christmas and the new year, I am reflecting on what my life was like 32 years ago when only God knew cancer cells were spreading uncontrollably in my blood and bone marrow.
At this point, the pain caused by undiagnosed cancer was controlling my life. I quit the basketball team after one scrimmage game, I had to give up a family Christmas condition where I helped set up Secret Santa at our school and I was I sleeping in a chair because it was the only place I found comfort. At this point I felt a sharp moving pain in my back doing pretty much everything. I couldn’t lay flat, laugh, sneeze, sit in a car or at my desk in school without pain. I had one wish that year for Christmas, for my pain to go away. I knew something wasn’t right, I knew my body was trying to tell me something, but truthfully I just wanted to feel like me again, I wanted to go back to living my life without pain controlling what I could and could not do.
What I didn’t know was I was experiencing what so many children do, a delayed diagnosis because cancer isn’t the first thing doctors think of trying to determine the cause of cancer.
December 1993 is one I will never forget. While the pain I felt is etched in my memory, I remember what it felt like to wake up Christmas morning more. That morning, the pain was gone. God answered my prayers, I was able to sit on the floor opening presents, ride in a car to Cleveland to see my grandparents and enjoy the day like I had so many years before.
The pain eventually returned and I at the end of January I was diagnosed with leukemia, but that December I experienced a Christmas miracle. I learned to power of hope and that miracles do happen.
So this Christmas I hope you take the time to be grateful for what you have in your life, and to look around to see the miracles of life around you.
Leukemiagirl 