Jadon+C’s+2017+OpEd+Article

= CANCER  =

By: Jadon Carlson


In my entire life I have only seen my father cry once. I have seen him at his best and his worst. Through my family’s darkest moments when everyone else is crippled and in despair he alone stands unfaltering in order to comfort those around him. Through every crisis including the death of his own mother, although that's a story for a different time, my father has put everyone else before himself. So when I came home from school one day to find him weeping in my mother’s arms, I was shook to my core. What could possibly cripple a man of his magnitude? My father had been diagnosed with cutaneous appendageal carcinoma, an extremely rare type of cancer that affects the sweat glands. After a only a few days, though each felt centuries long, my father had somehow come to terms with this plague. But cancer changed him, he started working harder, longer trying to earn as much money as he could in hopes of leaving me and my mother with enough to survive. He had essentially given up on himself, which is absolutely bizarre as he has never given up on anything as far as I can remember. Thankfully the doctors didn’t give up and after extensive treatments and an amputation my father is now cancer free. However this stupid little shit of a disease just couldn’t keep it’s grubby little hands off my family.

Shortly after celebrating the absence of cancer in my family my grandfather was diagnosed with urothelial carcinoma which is a very aggressive cancer that attacks the urinary system but more specifically for my grandfather, it went straight for his kidneys. Again my family went through the process of going from doctor to doctor getting opinion after opinion and going through a very suspenseful surgery before being cleansed of this vile disease. But this godforsaken pestilence won’t leave me the hell alone. After getting scared shitless by two incidents of cancer in my family my mother thought it would be a good idea to see a dermatologist as my great-grandfather had died of skin cancer. Thank god she did. My mom was diagnosed with skin cancer the day my grandfather was having the surgery to remove the tumors in his kidneys. Thankfully the doctors were able to remove both the tumors from my grandfather’s kidneys and the cancer from my mother’s skin, I think they actually froze the area on my mother’s skin and sent it to a lab somewhere to be tested on ( kinda cool but kinda freaky at the same time).

So after a roller coaster ride the past couple years constantly battling a ferocious disease my fight is over, for now at least as I have a 79% chance of getting some type of cancer in the future as all of the cancers that affected my family are genetic so that’s something I get to look forward to. Well I suppose I will fight that battle when it presents itself but until then I have nothing left to say about that putrid disease, except for one thing: FUCK CANCER. I should get one of those T-shirts, dude that would be a killer family photo if everyone was wearing one of those.