The Ones We Leave Behind

Prologue

          Life is short. That's a well-known fact most people take for granted. I know I did when I was young and naïve. That didn't last long. I got the cancer diagnosis a few months after my fourteenth birthday. I noticed my hip looked bigger, but I assumed that I was finally getting some curves; I was finally becoming a woman. A year and a half later, I found I was actually watching a life-threatening tumor grow—watching my own body slowly turn against me and go haywire as my cells deformed, and became what is known as Ewing's Sarcoma.

           Ewing's Sarcoma is a rare form of bone cancer only discovered a decade or two before I was born. I guess I'm just lucky, right? About a hundred children in the country are diagnosed with this form of cancer a year. That's about one in three million people.

Not only that, but only forty of these select children each year are girls.

Forty girls... There were 40 people on my junior high track team; hardly more than 40 people in my previous church.

          I fought for about ten months. It was ten months of pain, sickness, and torture. Months full of people pitying me and treating me like some fragile porcelain doll they needed to "handle with care". I hate pity.

          Those ten months were full of incessant nausea, fevers, pills, shots, and drugs. I had dozens of emotions streaming through me at once—sadness, worry, guilt for what I'd put my family through, hopelessness, weakness, depression, fear, and loneliness. I just wanted to die.

          I hardly looked at myself in the mirror, because what I saw was the most repulsive, disgusting-looking thing on the planet. My skin was yellow from lack of blood, my skin and nails were peeling because all of my cells were dying. I had no eyebrows or eyelashes; my lips were colorless; I had no hair; and my ribs were standing out. I was basically just skin and bone. I couldn't bear to think about what I looked like, much less actually look at myself. I realized how short life really is, and how in the blink of an eye everything can change. I mean, who at fourteen ever thinks it's a possibility to have cancer or die?

          People tell me every day that I am a warrior—that I'm the bravest person they know—but I feel nothing of the sorts. I was just sick and hoping to stay alive. You say I'm a warrior? I'm a soldier? I'm not brave or selfless. I never fought for anything but my own life. 

          I've learned to not take life for granted. Every year lived is another defying the odds. I've never really understood why people hate getting old. They are alive. Many people don't get the chance to live even half as long as the elderly. I know I won't.

          My name is Aleyna Baldwin, and it has now been almost four years since my last treatment. Four years of remission and thinking I'll be fine. Four years of planning what to do with the rest of my life. Four years thinking that horrid medicine had saved me from dying, and that I was finished with hospitals.

Well... now I'm back. Not for cancer treatment. But because that very same treatment that saved my life is now killing me. Or more particularly: killing my heart.