To celebrate our 2-year anniversary of being a nonprofit, Lacuna Loft is bringing back our top 31 articles from our archives! This is Flashback #30! Three Years Of Cancer Comedy was written by Bekah. These 31 articles are the best of the best and we’re very happy to share them with you again! The countdown continues tomorrow!
No, it wasn’t breast cancer, I just have small boobs.
After sizing me up, a man I just met had asked if it was breast cancer. And though I didn’t answer “No I just have small boobs” out loud, I most definitely said it in my head with uproarious laughter. (He was a nice man, which is why I laughed. Uproariously.)
Here’s the quick lowdown to satiate that little voyeuristic desire to know the details while simultaneously feeling a bit guilty that you want to know about someone’s cancer… it’s ok, we all do it. Cancer comes in so many forms (sadly), and even people with the same kind of cancer go through different treatments and deal with different complications along the way, so I’ll just give a quick summary.
Rare blood cancer: Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia type 2 (CMML-2). Diagnosed May 2013. I was 24 and otherwise completely healthy. It was found randomly. I did outpatient chemo for three months then month-long inpatient induction chemo to put me in remission, then a week off, then another month inpatient transplant-prep chemo to kill all my bone marrow, then a very anti-climatic bag of pink stem cells from an unknown donor was hung and dripped into my body and saved my life, NBD. After that I spent about a year in quarantine from the world in a little apartment in Salem, MA with my youngest sister (who was my caregiver, at 20 years old!) as my new immune system grew like a little, often treacherous, baby…
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