A brief note before I begin - today is the 29th anniversary of my bone marrow transplant performed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (July 15, 1991).
My next several entries concern the hardships of what someone dealing with permanent side effects of treatment faces in trying to support themselves and a family.
While everyone who has survived cancer knows that life is radically different post-treatment, the mental acceptance of those changes is overlooked. Understanding that your body will respond to outside stimuli vastly different creates anxiety, which one might never recover. While lifestyle changes can cause depression due to the constraints forced upon survivors, physical changes caused by treatment is enormously traumatic.
Athletically, my body disappeared overnight. My ability to run fast, jump high, and watch the baseball fly off my bat, were gone. Due to months of bed rest, muscles in my legs atrophied, along with nerves dying. I'd rather not discuss other side effects, but when I stared into the mirror, I could no longer recognize the person I saw.
Radiation and chemotherapy saved my life, but they gave me another person that I never met before. Perhaps the most challenging effect of treatment is the chronic conditions that followed. A year after treatment, my intestines began to flare up. This led to an eventual diagnosis of Crohn's disease.
