grimizen

I am surprisingly unsurprised that someone would stop so low as to pretend to have a potentially fatal disease just to get appreciation from strangers on the internet...

Humanity alternately amazes and disgusts me.

No, I simply decided more or less on a whim to share my story, partly with how COVID has affected many cancer sufferers and their treatment. Who is the karma kid?

I'm ever so sorry to hear about your grandpa, I often felt a bit guilty that I had an eminently curable tumour when I was on the same ward as children younger than me who would never live to see their twenties. As far as I'm aware, Germinomas don't have stages as such, but are more technically a birth defect. When you are born there are a variety of cells that should be reabsorbed into the placenta or some such, but in my case a tiny bundle wasn't, and it just so happened to turn up in the right place (or wrong place depending on your perspective...). It grew as I did, until eventually it was big enough to start pressing on the wrong bits of my brain.

It was a rather long journey to discovery, actually. All the symptoms were fairly subtle, until I started getting migrainous headaches. It was one morning when my mum was giving me a lift to college on her way into her job at a hospital; I started to feel really sick, and she decided - thanks to the symptoms she had been noticing - that she was going to take me to the hospital instead and have someone take a look at me. They decided to give me an MRI to be safe, and lo and behold a tumour! Or, more accurately, two very close together, called a bifocal tumour.

My view on death hasn't really changed - that is still a very scary thought - but my view on the process of getting there is much different now, particularly having come so close to dying myself. I saw children younger than me with incurable or incredibly virile cancers. I got to know one incredible young woman who would be on chemotherapy for another 2 years at the time, while I got away with two weeks of radiotherapy. You take life as you find it, and anyone who doesn't use the brain they were given because "school is boring" or something is wasting everything they have ever been given. I was trying desperately to succeed when I was diagnosed, and had gone from mostly B and up GCSE grades to no more than a D in any of my chosen college subjects no matter what I did, and there are people out there who are capable of so much more than what they give, but can't be bothered!