Hello and thank you so much to everyone who started following me after my submission to sexxxisbeautiful.

So here’s the story. You guys heard about how I have osteosarcoma. I was stage III when I was diagnosed in May 2009. I had a football sized tumor in my pelvis and nodules in my lungs. You guys heard about how they had to amputate my right leg and half of my pelvis.

There’s a lot that you haven’t heard, mostly because it’s hard to sum up everything that I’ve been going through. It’s been two years. Last February I went out to dinner with my sister to celebrate(?) the one year anniversary of the amputation. I joke a lot about everything. My sister calls me Stumpy. I make jokes about doing things half-assed, or “I don’t have a leg to stand on”, things like that. If I took things seriously all the time I wouldn’t be able to deal with it all. I’d just implode.

But it is serious. And there are lots of times that I’m so depressed and frustrated and scared and hate everything, and it feels like I am imploding, that I’m finally just going to snap. There are times that I wish I would die in surgery. There are times I wish I could give up and just end it already, but I can’t make myself do it. I keep hoping that someday I’ll go back to college, that someday I won’t be in the hospital all the time, that someday I’ll start to feel anywhere near normal again. I think about how unfair it is that I got the tumor in my pelvis, which is pretty rare for osteosarcoma. The tumors usually show up in the long bones. And if it had showed up in the long bone of my leg I could at least get a prosthetic. They wouldn’t have had to cut off half my pelvis and they wouldn’t have had to sever all those nerves. I would still have bowel and bladder function. I wouldn’t know what it feels like to have your colostomy bag fall off in public. I wouldn’t know what it feels like to go through 3-4 adult diapers in a day even with an indwelling catheter. I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be so disgusted by my body that sometimes I just want to rip into myself to make it go away.

It’s been about two years since I was diagnosed. In those two years I’ve had ten surgeries. I went through a year of one of the most intense chemo regimens that can be prescribed. I had my leg amputated. I started hating my body, thinking about how if things had been just a little different it wouldn’t be so hard. I can’t have a prosthetic. Before the amputation I asked that they leave me a stump so that if there was ever a chance of getting a prosthetic I’d have something to attach it to. I hope that someday the technology will advance enough that I can walk again. I went through what some of the nurses called boot camp physical therapy after the amputation. They got me moving again, built up my muscles, because recovery after the surgery meant that I laid in a bed for a month. I asked them if I could use forearm crutches, because I wanted to come as close as possible to walking.

When they woke me up after the amputation they didn’t even have me on enough morphine to cover what I had been taking daily for the pain before that. Not only did I basically have no pain medicine, but I was also going through withdrawals. As horrible as that experience was, it actually has made things easier for me. When I got lung surgeries after that I would keep telling myself that yes, this hurts, but it’s nowhere near the pain of an amputation.

The amputation was supposed to remove the last of the cancer. That was supposed to be the end. I was supposed to be able to go on with life. They did some checkup scans after a while and found that I had nodules in my lungs again. They keep coming back, despite chemo, despite surgery. I recently signed up to take part in a study on a drug. They want to see if it helps at all with bone cancer. Maybe I’ll get a miracle. I don’t really believe in miracles, but sometimes it’s nice to think they exist.

My sister is the whole reason I’m alive. She’s given up so much for me. I was diagnosed shortly after she graduated from college. She found a place for us to stay, and she helped me keep track of my medicine and records while they had me on morphine. I had some hallucinations in the beginning, and after that it was just incredibly hard to focus and concentrate. She kept me going. When I can’t do it for me, I do it for Mandy. We kind of joke sometimes about how we’re the same person but in two bodies, and even if it’s a joke, I feel like there’s some truth in it. She’s gone through so much and given up so much, and I think very few people realize it. People congratulate my mom and her boyfriend for taking care of me. They do, and I appreciate what they’ve done for me, but no one thanks Mandy. No one tells her how amazing she is, and no one recognizes all that she’s given up. I can never repay her for what she’s done for me.

Statistics say I’ll be dead in a couple of years. Maybe that’s why I do this stuff. Maybe that’s why I try to keep blogs and maybe that’s why I sent in my picture and story to sexxxisbeautiful. In the very likely circumstances that I die, I want to be remembered.

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