me and my lumpy neck

to this day, one of the biggest joys of my life is telling people that I (once upon a time) had cancer. that sounds demented and honestly it is, but i find an inexplicable glee in watching people try to piece together the timeline of how a buoyant youngster (sleep deprived 21-year-old) such as myself could have already fit in a traumatic event. some may even venture to say it’s The Traumatic Event™️ that so many fear. recently i’ve been trying to do tasters of listening to an array different pop culture podcasts (my current favorite is brooke and connor make a podcast) and something i’ve heard brought up a lot from people my age/adjacent to my age is jokes about how they’re scared various things (iPhone, squid oil— the usual suspects) will give them cancer. this is not a surprising thing to hear nor is it offensive (to me, anyways), but I have just been surprised by the sheer volume of people bringing it up. then again, I feel like I might be more sensitive to it right now and suffering from a case of baader-meinhof, where something is on your mind and you start hearing it brought up a lot and think it’s a weird coincidence that suddenly The Thing that is on your mind is everywhere, but really your awareness of this Very Common Thing is just exacerbated by your recent discovery or perseveration on Said Thing. and I have to believe that this situation (me noticing young people joking about getting cancer) is just be being baader-meinhoffed because cancer, specifically mine, has been on my mind recently because january 25 is the anniversary of when I first got diagnosed with cancer, AKA my cancerversary.

I feel like i’ve written so much about having cancer, so it feels annoying to go into it at this point. not to diminish the horrifying experience of being 14 and having cancer, but at this point I feel embarrassed to even gab about how it came to be. and I don’t mean how it came to be like a powerplant infected me (because truly who knows), but how I discovered I had cancer. so, let me just give you the highlights.

step 1: turn 14

step 2: go to doctor appointment for annual check-up

step 3: have a very paranoid doctor who feels weird bump on neck

NOTE: you had noticed your neck looking peculiar and slightly giant recently but figured a) puberty was occurring and b) people gain weight in different ways. so, you wrote it off and did not give it a second thought.

step 4: get ultrasound on neck. (technician has to be very unhappy with results)

step 5: get a fine needle aspiration

***best results if you’re afraid of a needle and have to be sedated so they can suck the tumor tissue out of your 14-year-old neck***

step 6: get diagnosed with papillary carcinoma thyroid cancer. extra points if your mom gets the phone call while you guys are picking up pizza from little caeser’s!

given that I was freshly 14, I was (obviously) in high school. I was a freshman at orange county school of the arts which means I was surrounded my intensely dramatic teenagers who could not keep their mouths shut. I told a few friends, but my original plan was to keep the situation under wraps. but, one of the friends squealed and started spinning the story to be a tall tale of what was really true. the friend had told people that I would be undergoing chemo and other things, which was categorically false. from the beginning, I knew that it would be a rough journey but that I was very lucky. my paranoid doctor discovered the tumor before it became invasive and spread, so the most i’d have to undergo was surgery and minor radiation. as the soon to be journalist I was, I could not let that fly. it was in my blood to seek truth and report it, so I took to instagram and made a sweet little post (read: inflicted trauma on my friends and people I hadn’t talked to in years) announcing that I DID, in fact, have cancer but that it was kind of chill.

to this day, I feel conflicted about the situation. i’m not ashamed of posting something like that nor was I looking for sympathy but, as I get older, I feel a growing sense of resentment to that friend who tried to write my story. I fear more anger about basically being outed for having cancer rather than being embarrassed to dedicate a space on my feed to a very ugly picture of me crying with a dog. (fun fact about the dog: allegedly this dog was in a Super Bowl commercial!)

however, the anger I felt over my agency being usurped was quickly overshadowed by the annoyance I felt over the performance my peers put on showing their false sympathy. that sounds harsh and cynical, but I promise you that seeing theater kids produce an amount of tears that could solve the drought was worse than having my neck constantly prodded.

another thing I realize as I get older is what a blur everything was. I try to think of what happened between January 25, 2016 (when I was diagnosed) and October 12, 2016 (when I went into remission) and I barely remember anything. it was a blur of well-meaning people being offensive, strangers hugging me, doctors feeling up my neck, yelling at my mom for eating all the dark chocolate (the only sugar I could have) that I ate (sorry mom) during my strict radiation diet, and still trying to balance my classes and extracurriculars. but, I made it through.

being diagnosed with cancer also made my mom’s doctors take her health more seriously. her thyroid had been a point of contention since she started having kids, but her doctors would constantly gaslight her into thinking she just needed to exercise more when it was, in fact, cancer.

today is January 25, 2023. it’s been 7 years since my mom got the call (at little caesar’s in huntington beach) that I had cancer. and, honest to god, I forget sometimes. I will see tiktoks about teens/young adults battling cancer and think how horrible that must me before recalling that I was once that teen/young adult battling cancer.

my life has changed. everyday I take a pill (shout out levothyroxine!) and I still get my neck felt up regularly (unpleasant). and if I ever have a daughter, I will have to anticipate that, she too might fall victim to a life of neck ultrasounds and general thyroidlessness because women are far more likely to have thyroid cancer than men are.

i’ve said it a million times, but having cancer taught me to be resilient. I will not sugar coat it— it sucked. I was very lucky, but it still sucked because I was a 14-year-old with cancer! but, it taught me that I was strong and, despite being dealt a pretty rough hand, I was capable of making light out of the situation. there were days where I feared how my life would change. I would wonder what would become of my plans and the adventures I dreamt about. looking back, it feels very dramatic, but I also try to give 14-year-old Bella grace for how she dealt with this impossible situation. I hadn't yet been old enough to have a learner’s permit or learn that my eyeliner did not have to cover my entire eyelid. but, I learned that, despite being in the eye of a sh*t storm, I would come through the other side, not unscathed and somehow different, but stronger.