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Jarrett Stein: In his own words
- By Jarrett Stein
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I was literally taken out of the world I knew and suddenly surrounded by sights and sounds and smells that I had never experienced. Like so many other childhood
cancer patients, my diagnosis was a total shock.
I was a freshman in high school and playing on the tennis team. So, during spring break in Florida, my Mom and I practiced every day. After a few days, my Mom sensed that something was wrong. I knew I had been tired and not very hungry and that I had a slight cough, but that didn't seem reason enough to go to my pediatrician on the last day of spring break. But Mom insisted, and we went on Friday afternoon. Among other things, my doctor noticed that I had developed a heart murmur, so an appointment was made for an echocardiogram at Vanderbilt on Monday. I went to school that Monday, carrying my tennis racket, expecting to go to practice after the echo. However, the results of the echo changed everything.
During the echo, the first nurse couldn't find what she was looking for, so she called a second nurse who also moved the wand around the left side of my chest. When they asked the doctor to come in, he checked my back and the right side of my chest before saying, "Ah... there it is." I thought he had found the murmur and I relaxed, but what I found out later was that they were having trouble finding my heart because there was a mass that was so large it had moved my heart to the right side of my chest. From there I endured countless tests and procedures over the next two days, the longest of my life, until the final diagnosis came on Wednesday night — an advanced stage of non-Hodgkin's B-cell lymphoma.
Monday morning I was a regular kid on my way to school and by Thursday morning I was having my first round of chemo. A few days before, I was a healthy kid with a cough. Now I had cancer. I went from playing football with my friends at lunch to statistically facing death, in three days. I've heard it happens like this for lots of kids. They may have a pain in their leg or just feel really tired and suddenly tests show that they have cancer.
That first Wednesday night, when I learned I had cancer and what my treatment would be, the only way I knew how to react to this overwhelming news was to decide that there was absolutely no way I was going to lose this battle. So, I did everything my doctors and nurses told me to do: I cleaned my catheter every day, I tried to relax when my newly trained Mom gave me shots every day, and I tried to eat, although not every day and not until a feeding tube was described as the next option. I wasn't brave (after all, up until then I hated having my finger pricked during my annual exams) but I also wasn't scared. I wasn't scared because everywhere I went I had people at the hospital watching over me.
My treatment roadmap consisted of six rounds of high dose chemo, so for each round, I was in the hospital for six to 10 days and then at home in between for about three weeks, to let my counts recover. At that time my family was focused on getting through each day. We knew that the drugs were toxic, but we also knew that it was my only option. There were many areas of my life where I no longer had options. For example, I couldn't go to school and I couldn't see my friends. But, and this is a very important "but," my doctors and nurses always tried to give me choices, even if it was only the choice to take my medicine in liquid or pill form, or which arm to get a shot, or whether to be asleep or awake during a spinal. By letting me know I still had choices, I realized that I could also choose my attitude. So, when I was wheeled into surgery, I chose to have a smile on my face. I wanted to be the kid in the hospital that doctors looked forward to seeing in the morning. I wanted to be the kid that the nurses enjoyed spending time with when they changed my IV. I just wanted to make the best of the experience that had been dealt to me.
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