#but my muscles hurt a littlw

[reallifepotato]

Am positive for covid

[sootends]

you are me in different circumstances and i am you.

rememember when we were diagnosed with stage III laryngeal cancer on our 21st birthday? everyone was shocked, including us. ppl dont develope layrngeal cancer unless they are 65+ and have been smoking multiple packs a day for decades. they still dont know how we got it.

i wish you couldve seen us- it was bad- 114 pounds, our hair falling out, unable to eat or drink, barely able to sit up without needing to lay down- they hospitalized us immediately haha. idk if you remember, but we were in so much throat pain we hadnt been able to eat properly in quite sometime. The tumor on our layrnx had grown so large that swallowing ANYTHING (yes even spit and water) had become a monumentally painful task. all the doctors agreed the best course of action was to shave down the tumor (they couldnt just remove it without destroying our voicebox) and place a feeding tube thru the skin and muscle directly into the stomach.

do you recognize that description?

they placed the tube directly above our naval, and now it appears as if we have 2 bellybuttons.

3 doses of chemo (cisplatin) and 3 months of radiation. mama came back from philly to be with us. we couldnt afford to live anywhere so our friend carol (65 year old japanese woman and her son, seymon) let us live in her basement while we were being treated.

its so strange to think we were homeless while we had cancer. its strange to think that counts. i met a woman on the street who had cancer, every hospital refused to treat her because she was homeless and had no where to stay. they called her a liability.

we spent 3 months in carols basement. 3 months in our tiny pink room, beneath the earth. we felt undead- we watched as our cheeks and eyes sunk into our skull. we watched our hair thin, but not fall out. this chemo didnt make your hair fall out, and idk about you but something in me almost wished it did. even sleep was affected; we never watched to touch the tube, so we folded our hands across our chest and slept like a corpse every night. we didnt eat or drink anything with our mouth for 3 months.

the formula was made by nestle. you know, the chocolate child-slavery company. apparently nestle got its start in formulas before ever touching confectionairy. in order to eat, now i know you remember this, we had this comically huge syringe- i mean the damn thing looked straight out of a cartoon- and we would pour out the formula into a container and slurp it up into the syringe.

our feeding tube didnt look exactly like this, but its close enough. you see the part that says Y-adapter? once the syringe was full wed pop off the plug, open the clamp, and pour formula directly into our stomach.

yum.

we couldnt taste it but the aroma would waft up from our gut into our throat sometimes. it tasted like cardboard (and was quite sticky to the touch). do you remember how it felt every time it hit our stomach? this was also the only way we could drink water, being thirsty and hungry became a whole new sensation.

we began to miss chewing so much we found this website that sold chewy stim toys for autistic kids and adults. it was a littlw blue robot, its hanging on our wall now. couldnt bare to get rid of it.

it was also the height of the covid lockdown. very lonely time to have cancer, we fought constantly. fighting fighting fighting- cancer, ourselves, our mother, our feelings, our memories, our desires, our own happiness, our humanity, we fought it all. we were mean and selfish- caught in the ol selfdestructive misery loop.

Feel Bad -> Do Something Selfish To Make Urself Feel Better -> Selfish Action Hurts The People Around U -> Feel Bad -> Repeat

hard lessons, cancer is full of them.

These were my circumstances. these were our circumstances. i never wish that we traded places, but i wish you couldve seen. i feel no qualms about subjecting others to my own ruinous state, if this had to be my reality the least you could do is look.

[theood]

*trying to convey this isn't just me complaning I hurt a littlw and this is muscle deep pain in my thighs ti tue point just moving in bed was a Herculean task and almost made me cry and I can barely walk to the bathroom* I hurt really bad and I'm extremely sore

My mom: :(! It's because you aren't used to being on your feet! You can't miss work :(!! No!