And I had this sense, even though I couldn't quite wrap my head around what it meant to have a cancer diagnosis at 22, that the person I'd been before was buried, there was no returning to that pre diagnosis itself.
Friends packed up my things and and sent them to my house. And, you know, I never returned to Paris, to my apartment, to my job. There was my life before and everything that came after. I think there was this immediate sense of fracture. To hear the words that you were diagnosed with a specific type of leukemia at 22 is scary enough, but when they said the chances of survival were one in three, what goes through a 22-year old's head? And within 24 hours I was on a plane back home to upstate New York, and I got the bone marrow biopsy that led to my actual diagnosis. And it was only when I got to a point where I was so weak, it was a struggle to walk up and down the stairs that I found myself in an emergency room. Youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand. But I think the truth is I wasn't entirely taking myself seriously.
And toward the end of my time in Paris, I started to get the feeling that my doctors that I was seeing were taking me seriously. I went to see a number of doctors, all of whom, you know, treated that specific symptom and sent me home. But the biggest symptom I had was fatigue. I was getting colds all the time, and coming down with bouts of bronchitis. It started with an itch and it just blossomed into all kinds of mysterious symptoms. So, at the time I was living in Paris, I was just a couple of months out of college. It was only when I got to a point where I was so weak, it was a struggle to walk up and down the stairs that I found myself in an emergency room.
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