SYNOPSIS:

At age two and a half, I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Going to the hospital everyday and having to come up with some lie to tell everyone at school because of the cruelty of children. I was diagnosed with it very early so the beginning stages of the disease are very blurry to me. So my story starts at about five and continues into my adulthood. At age five I was taking twenty pills a day, which was just the beginning with multiple visits for pneumonia and radiation treatments that had suction cups all over my body. A life experience that not too many people get the chance to have and trust me you don’t. I remember the day like it was yesterday, I was taking a bath and my mother was combing my hair in the bath tub, which you are probably asking why was she doing that? You see a combination of the pills and radiation made my hair fall out. I was hysterical and my mother had tears running down her cheeks as she was pulling my hair out, literally. Luckily, the doctors and my mother came up with the plan of doing it when summer hit but it didn’t stop people from looking at me like I was a freak. You see this was in the mid eighties and I was the second child in my age group to respond to the medicine and treatment with some successes. That summer we took a vacation to Florida and Disney World. I didn’t get to much attention at the park because of my lack of hair; I had a baseball cap on to hide it. But that night when we went to a restaurant for dinner I had a million eyes on me feeling like million daggers stabbing me at the same time. That was the worst feeling when people stopped what they were doing just to gawk at me. Some mothers even left the restaurant because they thought they would catch what I had. The chemotherapy also thinned my blood out so the doctors could work on getting my white and red blood cells to a workable and normal count. For all the non-doctors that’s what Leukemia is, a disease that attacks and destroys blood and platelet cells. That summer I was real thin and had to watch what I consumed because ingredients like salt can clog my blood and/or if I was cut I could bleed to death even from the tiniest cut like a paper cut or a mouth soar. So French fries, pizza, and popcorn were out of the question for me, but for my parents telling there eight year old that he can’t have something just enraged me more. Not because I was a spoiled child but trying to have an eight year old understand the complexities of a disease like cancer was like nails on a chalk board. And it opened the flood gates to criticism about the parenting skills of my mother and father. Would you shut that kid up was a commonly used phrase during the nine years that I had cancer. I wrote “The Warrior” not to write another story about a sick child but to describe in detail what I went through in the 80’s when I had cancer. It was a disease that not a lot of doctors had a cure for and people were very uncomfortable with the unknown. In “The Warrior” I give a detailed encounter and description of my pain that I had to come to terms with physically and mentally even well after I went into remission.

THE WARRIOR