I remember being very young and riding up on my Papa's shoulders, a smile on my lips. Then I remember sitting next to his hospital bed with tears in my eyes. If you didn't know him you'd think he was dead. But I knew better. I knew that if you looked into his eyes you'd find his smiling eyes. Papa always had two sets of eyes, his happy eyes, and his angry eyes. He was wearing his happy eyes when they shut for the last time. He died of cancer. I remember asking my mother what cancer was. I being such a young innocent child did not grasp the concept that such a small word had killed my Papa.
I celebrated my 10th birthday cooped up in a hospital room that I shared with a girl who cried for her mother the whole night. Word was I had cancer. Although I never would have actually known this if I hadn't of figured it out myself. My parents thought that it would be better for me not to know what was happening inside my body. They thought what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me. Which is usually the case right? Wrong. Without knowing what was wrong with me made me scared. It made me want to run away and hide. I didn't like that people talked behind my back. And I didn't like that I was missing my 10th birthday.
I was so scared. I cried all the time. Not because I hurt, but because I was scared. I could take the pain, but not the pain inside me, the one that my parents and friends were inflicting by not revealing to me what was wrong with my own body.
When my hair fell out my mother assured me that it would grow back but never told me why it had fallen out every night when I slept. I hated the feeling of running my hand over my head and not feeling my long brown hair that once reached my waist. While girls my age were finally growing talented to fixing their hair in pretty pink tails, I was stuck wearing a cloth around my head that made me look like a pirate.
My parents did tell me small parts of what was happening. They did tell me I had leukemia. But I never knew what leukemia was. They just said it was like the flu. The day my parents told me they were the ones that cried, I however felt better knowing that my hair WOULD grow back. I had something to work towards.
I thought I was cured. I thought it was like chicken pox, you know, you get it once, and probably never get it again. As soon as I realized that I could get cancer again I started to worry about everything. I once fell off my bike and ran to my mother sobbing, telling her I had cancer again. She hugged me securely and told me there was nothing I can do to make myself have cancer again; it's not in my hands. Those words made me feel somewhat better. Yet, now I struggled with the idea that God was giving me cancer.
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