“You have cancer.” Shock and utter confusion circulated through my body. My vision is blurry, like looking through a foggy windshield sitting in a car on an autumn morning. It’s a sensation where your life seems at a halt. This phrase, so simple yet so sharp almost changed my life, and definitely altered my outlook; it shook the once normal world I knew, the one once so comfortable.

It was a Thursday afternoon in late May, humid air and damp pavements, just days after my birthday, and there I lay on a hospital bed of Doernbecher’s at OHSU. The continuous sound of children speaking to their loved ones, hospital beds rolling down the brisk white tiles, and curtains sliding back and forth on the rods filled the floor, and my head. I appeared as an innocent, new thirteen-year-old. A thirteen-year old’s whose life revolved around tickets to Justin Bieber and shirts that read “Abercrombie and Fitch” across the chest. Someone who was forced to really only focus at my parents’ troubled faces at the foot of my bed. I remember my Dad’s face in particular, which was washed out and his eyes beady on the nurses every move; the very same Dad who always told me not to worry and rarely expressed his fear with his bear-like figure that stood large and tall. My parents’ repetitious sayings of how proud they were that I was so strong in this process only made me more anxious inside, as though thinking maybe I should be afraid of what was to come next.

“It’s going to be alright, they’ll take care of you.” “You’re being so strong, you can do it.”

These encouraging words flew in a continuous stream in my head and made me terrified to wheel out of the operating room and hear the constant word that ruins lives everyday: cancer.

The nurse moved over to my right side and informed me that an IV necessary for the procedure would be put in my hand. Shivers rolled through my body as the thought of a sharp needle entering the thin layer of skin upon my hand was soon to come. The warm pack that lay on my hand in preparation for the IV felt comforting, but the sensation was soon taken away as the nurse carefully and gently poked, then slid the needle into the largest vein on my hand.  Soon, the warm fluid of some type of medicine that would make me feel “loopy and loose,” as the nurse described it, flew up to my veins and the comforting feeling was now a numb tingle to cover up the dark truth I was about to endure. The quick words that the nurse spoke came from the top of my pillow on the bed where my head lay upon, assured that it was going to be alright.

“The surgery won’t take long, you’ll do great!” “It’ll all be over soon.” “No need to worry, you’re in great hands. It’ll be alright!”

It’s not alright! CANCER?! That’s alright to you?? It seemed as though moments before entering the room, leaving my mom and dad behind me in the comfortless hospital room, that every possible worry consumed my mind.

Will I still be okay? Will I forever be a sick child? ...Is this the end? These concerns ate me and my unstable mindset at the time alive. The doors were then thrust open in front of me as my metal portable bed pushed them apart, and the bright circular light was the last sight I saw.

That was it. The moment I fluttered my eyes open to the scene of ice chips offered by the nurse and my dad directly over my head. I knew I was okay.

“It’s a misdiagnosis, Avery! You’re okay, you did it. You’re going to be okay,” my dad’s 6’6” figure shadowing over me was talking so sharply and so perfectly, but these words seemed impossible.

A misdiagnosis? My mind shuffled every word trying to make it out, trying to make out the new reality. It then registered to me: I was one of the lucky few to be able to hear those heavenly words. No chemotherapy, no hair loss, no sickness, no nothing. Nothing but a normal life again, a life where I could now sit back and look around and realize life is nothing short of fragile, where everyday counts. And it hasn’t stopped there. Everyday as I listen to the tragic news about passings of children in our schools like Sam Day and Nathalie Traller, adults in our community, or anyone with cancer, the vivid images of what I went through yet was fortunate enough to leave the hospital the same day with act as a constant reminder to be grateful for what I have as the same is not for everyone. Life is precious.