Valiant

Chapter 1

I remember the day I got diagnosed like it was yesterday. I broke my hand and the doctors couldn't explain the cause. And I was having these huge lumps in my hands and legs the week before. And I was getting more and more sick everyday. I was only twelve and I just thought I lacked calcium or something. I wasn't too stressed. When the doctor told me that I could possibly have a brain tumor it was like my whole world came crashing down. A month before I got diagnosed my biggest worries were loosing weight and getting good grades. I dreaded the day I had to go the hospital for an MRI to confirm that the tumor was there or not. After spending what felt like forever in some machine the MRI doctor told me that the tumor there and that it was in the point where my spine and skull meet.

My parents and family were calm and acting like nothing was wrong. I was in denial. I didn't want to admit I was sick at first. I avoided seeing a specialist as long as I could but I gave up in the end. A month later I started medication. It started with three pills but my body kept rejecting the medicine and the medicines pilled up. Three months after I started using the medicines I could barely recognize myself. I gained weight and I looked almost anorexic and you could tell I was sick just by looking. I started homeschooling at one point because I couldn't afford to miss school because I wasn't 'normal' and I didn't have a lot of friend at school so I wasn't really that sad to stop going to school.

When my body kept rejecting the medication the doctors suggested I switched to chemotherapy. I was scared and I knew it would change me but I agreed to start chemotherapy. That's how met Yushua and I'd love to say it was love at first sight but then I would be lying. I was at the cancer center for my first chemo session. I saw him just standing there talking to a doctor. I was curious about what a guy like him was doing at a place like that. He looked at me with that look of sympathy and pity that I hated so much. We saw each other almost every time I came for my chemo. He worked there part-time because it was his fathers cancer center. We eventually became friends. The more time I spend with him the more I fell for him but I didn't tell him how I felt. We had a fight-one-minute-and-say-sorry-the-other-minute kind of a friendship. One day we got into a fight and things got heated up and we both ended up confessing our feeling for each other.

We were in a relationship for over two years. We would spend almost every weekend together. Yushua would come to the hospital every time something went wrong. We were just like any other couple. We had our ups and downs. But then my cancer started to spread and I was in stage 2A and the my chances were becoming more slim. I really loved Yushua and most people would call me selfish but I called it controlling collateral damage. I broke up with him and told him I never wanted to see him again. He moved to England and I stayed in New York.

I fell into depression after he left. I refused to step out of the house other than to go to the hospital. My cancer got even worse. I made another friend during one of those trips to the cancer center. Her name is Izzy and she was a cancer patient like me. We started hanging out and we became friends fast. My condition started to get critical when I started to show signs of 'falling' into a coma. That basically means I was going into a coma very slowly but there was nothing the doctors could do to avoid it. And let me tell you that slowly falling into coma is the worst thing I had to go through in my life.