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Heather Cleland

I had just started my second year of university when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. I was completely astounded. How could this happen? To ME? I’m NORMAL! I have PLANS! I have other things to do! I’m only nineteen! CANCER? No way, sorry dude, wrong person. You must have thought I was one of those people who wait around for the diagnosis and see it coming a mile away, you know, all the people who normally get cancer?

Everyone is normal. Normalcy is a risk factor for cancer. Beliefs of invincibility do not carry over into reality, even if you are only nineteen. That’s not to say you should batten down the hatches, prepare for the worst, refuse to go out and count the minutes until something goes wrong because Murphy said it would just because it could. Live, carry on but know things can change, and will change, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes seemingly for the worst, other times not, but they always will. That became as obvious to me in September 2001 as sitting on a fire is obvious. But then my Grandma sent me a card, with a butterfly bookmark in it. All that the card said was, "People and butterflies are both lovely and durable."
Sure, life can throw you a curveball, but you can throw it right back.

I dropped out of school for the year, moved home to my parents on the other side of the country and braced myself. At around the five-month mark, my lung capacity became dismal. At six months, I caught a series of infections that sent me to the emergency room four times in one week. I remember lying on the bathroom floor, shivering, nauseated, hairless, weak and trying my best to cling on to the end of my rope. The only words that kept repeating themselves in my head were, "These are the complications that kill you." A week earlier I had been told my cancer was in remission, but the chemo was still hard at work. Two weeks later I was told that the 22-year-old girl with a brain tumour who I had met through the Cancer Centre had passed away.

I held on to that rope and it was there, dangling in mid-air, slipping, that I figured out what was going on. Cancer, in and of itself, is not fun. But cancer never exists in and of itself; it exists as a part of an ordinary person - ordinary people who can live life and laugh often, in the face of uncontrollable forces that try to get in the way, so long as they recognize that option – and it’s always there. These natural forces of the earth make it so easy to fall; and so much more difficult to fight to get back up. But the view is so much nicer from up top. It makes the fight, no matter how difficult, all worthwhile. Because that moment, when you rise above it all, is beautiful.

I’ve been in remission for over a year and have returned to school in Victoria, BC. I have just finished the year of university that I started almost 2 years ago and have yet to let a curveball get the best of me. that I was able to find one.