| Ok, first things first I guess. I'll tell you a little about myself. My name's Mike for anyone who doesn't know me. I am student at the University of Pittsburgh, or rather I was. Well, still am I guess, just I had to withdraw from this semester. Let me tell you a story. For my second semester at college I thought it would be sweet to take a cool class that had nothing to do with my major, which by the way is Chemical Engineering. So I decided to take a Ju Jitsu class. I figured it'd keep me in shape and I'd learn to kick butt at the same time. Well, it didn't turn out quite as well as I had hoped. The first week of class I turned out being the one who got his butt kicked, and it landed me in the hospital. They did some tests and all kinds of stuff to see what was wrong, and found that I had lacerated my spleen. Pretty bad too, they said if I wasn't so stubborn with pain and had come in when I was first injured they would have taken the spleen out right away becuase of how seriously I got hurt. But they didn't take it out becuase the bleeding had stopped and there was nothing more they could do. They released me and said to just be careful and come back in two weeks for another check-up. The whole time I was bothered by the fact that I had injured myself so seriously, so easily. I mean, some of my friends know that I've had some nasty falls and gotten up without a scratch. Well, maybe not without a scratch, but I never ended up in the hospital. And now I was in the hospital from a controlled fall on mats. It just didn't make sense. So two weeks passed by, and the night before my scheduled check up I began to feel sharp pain where my spleen was for no reason. I was going to just dismiss it and see what the hospital had to say, but my mother talked me into going to the emergency room since the pain came back. I did, and they did all of their tests again. This time they could see things a lot more clearly (since there wasn't a gallon of blood hanging out around my spleen this time). What they saw though wasn't a good thing. They saw tumors growing in my spleen, and my spleen was to be taken out imediately. The next day I'm sitting in my hospital bed recovering from major abdominal surgery. Not something I'd recomend. They kept me for observation to make sure I healed and said that they would tell me what was up with the tumors as soon as they knew. This is where things started to get scary. A few days later at home we got a call from the hospital. They had looked at the tumors they removed from my body and told me that I have Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. A type of cancer that attacks and grows throughout your lymph system. Since that day my life has changed, and this journal will allow me to keep track of that change. This journal begins after my first chemo threatment, and I will try to keep it up to date as often as I can. Understand though that my days now consist of me sitting at home wishing something would happen. So if I don't write for a day or two don't assume I'm dead or that I'm just plain lazy. It just means there's nothing worth writing about and hence, nothing worth reading. |