Neoplasia: A Tale of Confronting Cancer Challenge

Rediscovering life’s essence through neoplasia’s lens

Photo by Nicole Avagliano on Unsplash

“Suspicion of neoplasia.”

Well, I don’t know what that means. It’s going to be some kind of respiratory tract disease, something like sinusitis. Let’s see, I google it like I usually do with anything I don’t understand.

A chill runs through my entire body when I read the first sentence of the search: “Neoplasia means cancer.” My mind immediately explains everything: “Maybe, among other things, it can mean that. Let’s see what other meanings there are.”

There are no other meanings. I feel like I’ve just been struck by lightning. Every inch of my body feels like glued to the spot. I don’t know how to react. A silent tear rolls down my right cheek, followed by another on the left. More of them launch into the void and I feel tiny legs crawling across my face.

No, this can’t be. Yeah, he’s fine except sometimes his nose bleeds. It is true that he has had severe headaches for several months, that sometimes he takes several pills a day and they don’t go away. Luckily, when he goes out on a bike, he feels better. Biking is his passion.

I’ll google the symptoms and see what comes up.

The leaves on the trees rustled in the gentle breeze, but the air wasn’t chilly yet. September 19th, a day that I will remember forever to be cold, numbness I felt in my body. I put on long sleeves and sunk into the soft sofa. I got lost looking for information on the Internet that tells me that this isn’t what it seems. My cat is pacing around asking me to remove the laptop from me so she can lie down. I don’t listen to her. I don’t care about anything other than calming my mind.

I found a doctoral thesis by an MD student in Italian. He talked about all the kinds of weird growths that can happen in your nose. It was stage 4 cancer with a 6-month chance of survival.

In a single day, in just a few minutes, the world had turned upside down. It turned away from me and robbed my happiness. Nothing mattered anymore. My love was dying and I couldn’t do anything. How to fight terminal cancer? Why is this happening to us? So many questions came to me and no answers.