Cancer, You’ve Changed Me

Dear LGL Leukemia,

I know last time I wrote a letter I said I would always call you by your full name but for brevity’s sake, I will call you that (or your even cooler nickname, LGLL).

I’ve known you for a little over ten years now. The last ten years have been transformative. When I first had an inkling that I had cancer, I was on the train on the way to a teacher job fair (where I sat around for four hours because I had no requests for interviews or interest expressed in my resume) when I got that notification of new test results; just the results of my yearly blood test for medication levels. Two months and six days after that day on the train, I heard your full name for the first time: Chronic NK Cell and T-Cell Large Granular Lymphocyte Leukemia. It’s funny, I laughed; the oncologist prefaced your introduction with, “So. It’s rarer than we thought!” What could be rarer than having Chronic NK LGLL? Both subtypes at the same time! Now as I write this letter to you, lying in bed trying to sleep, I examine the ways that cancer has impacted my life.

Without you, I might have gotten a teaching job and could have been teaching for almost ten years at this point. Or maybe alternate me taught for a few years and got bored, like the one neuropsychologist told me I would – back in 2010 he said teaching wouldn’t be intellectually stimulating enough for me unless I had a hobby like writing (which I thought was silly – Me? A writer? No way! I’m only good at writing college papers!). Maybe I went back to college for further education or for a different career? The Social Security judge did tell me that I would be a great advocate to help people applying for SSI: she told me that I was one of the most prepared people she had ever seen in her hearing room – she ran out of the room and caught my parents and I right before we went into the elevator just to tell me that.

Because of you, I don’t think I can ever teach. I’m mildly immunocompromised for the rest of my life and as I think everyone knows, children are sentient adorable petri dishes who continually produce all kinds of new and exciting germs to get everyone sick. You think I’d be angry about that, but I’m not. Maybe it’s because it’s been over ten years since I’ve been in a classroom or maybe it’s that I’ve accepted it as the truth. Either way, the trajectory of my life has been irrevocably changed.

With you, though, I have done things that I never would have done. Because of *you* I read something that I wrote in front of a crowd of over fifty people! I shook like a leaf during my public speaking class in college (and that was “just” 25 people!), but somehow I read something I wrote without stammering or stuttering or spontaneously combusting? Did you give me the courage to do that? Did the primordial ooze of anxiety and all of those other emotions that cancer makes bubble over so it wasn’t affecting me? Or did something emerge that helped me grow? Could it be that after seven years of dealing with you, I finally bit the bullet and went to some of the virtual groups that sounded so scary? The groups that I noticed popping up when I was a month into my second line treatment, when COVID started up, sounded so scary; sitting on my couch at the screen and people just looking at me through the webcam in my laptop, who would want to do that? You made me socialize – how dare you do that! Don’t you know I have anxiety and autism?

Due to you, I have been a part of the crappiest club since 2015. But, I didn’t know that it had such great people in it until I started going to virtual Zoom groups at the end of 2022. I’ve met some amazing people because I got LGLL. However, this community comes with pain – we have lost some great people due to cancer, but I had the privilege of getting to know these people. I have had some people thank me for being there for them, having resources to help them, and you are the reason why I have been able to help them.

As strange and messed up as it sounds, I cannot picture my life without you. We’ve been attached at the…blood? bone marrow? for over ten years now. I don’t know exactly how long I had you before that first blood draw in March 2015, but we have a rough idea. When they figured out your name, I didn’t have any symptoms. My doctors found it weird that you weren’t making me have a fever or any chills or night sweats or any of those lovely symptoms that I get asked about at every doctor’s visit. You are why I am where I am today. You are the reason why I have friends. You have made me leave the house and talk to people. You have given me a card to enter the exclusive club of young adults with cancer – a crappy commonality that none of us wanted to have, but appreciate what it has given us: friends from all walks of life who would’ve never met otherwise.

LGLL, I don’t want to thank you for appearing in my body (I would’ve rather had something else remarkably rare happen…winning the lottery would’ve been nice!), but I want you to know that I appreciate what you have forced me to do over the last ten years. You have made this guy who has been disabled since birth become an accidental advocate. You have made me learn all kinds of medical terms I never would have expected to need to know. You have made it so I can call so many amazing people my friend and vice versa. You have made it that, for some reason, one of the research coordinators at the lab that researches you has called me a leader in the patient community.

If you’ve done that in ten years, where are we going to be in another ten years?

Let’s find out.

Signed,

Cody (aka the body you are in)