** Winner of The Watty's 2014: Collector's Dream Award ** ** This is a true story. Now FULLY edited ** I was diagnosed with Cancer a week before my 16th Birthday. I had Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and had to undergo Chemotherapy and a Stem Cell transplant, back in 2003. My whole life changed. I wrote this book when I was 17, when all my treatment was over, to catalogue everything I had learned and experienced. I had no information about Cancer during my treatment; it was all aimed at adults and I was a teenager who didn't understand most of what happened. So I wrote this book. I was a teenager when I wrote, when I had Cancer and I wanted this to be an information, honest account of what it was really like to have Cancer and go through the treatment....from a teenager's perspective. It's sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always honest. There may be parts that you squint at, because you're embarrassed to read them...well, I was embarrassed writing them. But that's the whole point of honesty. To get it out in the open. To be real. And that's what this is.

That day in the kitchen with Grandma when I was was twelve was something new. There were no recipes, no measuring spoons or cups. Just a thousand years of tradition being passed down.