They made an incision in my left hip. Laying there on the raw steel table, my leg cut open. The doctor would take a sample of my bone and walk away to study it under the microscope. Studying it right then and there, determining if I had cancer. My eyelids became heavy and each blink slower. I was slowly starting to fall unconscious. The doctor walked towards me, colors around the room began to blend and everything turned hazy before going dark.

I woke up getting wheeled out of the hospital in South Florida. As I was getting pushed through the longing hallway, I started regaining consciousness. The recovery room was filled with dim-lighted fluorescent lights, my mom was sitting across from me with a grin.

“Your results came back benign. No Cancer!”

Benign. Ease swarmed my body as I let the drugs they gave me take over. The rest of the procedure happend when I was unconscious. They drilled the bone out, filled it with a bone graft and placed a titanium plate in my left hip. They told me that the pain should go away in a few months. It never did.

The time started to tick on. Six months. Seven months. The pain was still there. By eight months the pain was worse than it ever was before. I went to my doctor for a check up. They performed a CT scan on me that day and had me sit in the examination room waiting for the results. The doctor held my results in his hands, right there. The results that determined something bigger. He held the CT up to the light and revealed what had been hurting me since I was 13. A tumor. A tumor that kept growing and growing for seven years. It wasn’t benign at all, but malignant. I was only 24. Twenty-four years old and I had cancer. They misdiagnosed me eight months earlier. The limp that I had developed overtime was the tumor cracking through my bone and tissue. Through my femur. I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. I accepted the fact that I had cancer, the fact that having cancer was outside of my control, but I knew that there was a challenge in front of me and decided to take action right away.

Before anything could be done, I had to go through chemotherapy and reduce the size of the tumor. Chemo was a beast all unto its own. Some days were bad, real bad, others weren’t. A total of 12 months and 19 rounds of chemo. Each treatment involved at least four days in the hospital, and one specific drug required my presence back-to-back weeks. Of course, with my least favorite of my three chemo meds. This was, and still is, considered a very heavy protocol. Considering that the tumor had most likely been in my leg since I was 13, and unencapsulated during the misdiagnosis, it was quite advanced. Stage three to be precise.

There are a number of side effects that come along with the cancer party. First, the nausea, possibly the most famous of the chemo effects and there is no question that I had a great deal of it. The other big side effect was, to my dismay, hair loss. My long, luscious locks (believe it or not) were gone; long ago in the days prior to this fantastic beard. Eyebrows, gone. Leg and arm hair, gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. It was all gone.

There are more undesirable effects to chemo that include a terrible sore throat, body aches and horrible nightmares. Describing these “dreams” is really only possible to people who have gone through it. I always called it chemo-brain. There is no question though, that this first big surgery was a real challenge.

My surgery was major. A hip and femur resection. They put me back on that familiar steel table and put me under anesthesia. They cut my femur and removed it from my leg. The hip followed shortly. Around three quarters of all the other stuff in my leg was removed, the muscle, the tissue, everything. By the time the tumor was removed, it was the size of a football. A metal hip and femur took its place. They sewed me back up and the rehabilitation would begin, but within two weeks, my hip became dislocated. I was put in for another surgery to have the hip put back. After that, I developed MRSA. I was unable to start chemo until the infection went away. After six weeks of infections and treatment, I was able to start my post-surgical chemo. After the surgeries, the infections, the obstacles, I began the healing process. One year. Nineteen chemo treatments.

When I found out I had cancer, my wife and I had been dating for a year and a half. I was fortunate enough to have friends and family that gave me unconditional love and support. My grandparents were good with money and I did not have to worry about expenses. The only thing I had to focus on was beating this and to do whatever the doctors told me what to do. My parents divorced at 11, getting child support from my dad was always a long-going problem, but when I became sick, it actually brought them together again as friends. My stepmom took care of me for four months before my wife moved to South Florida. My wife, girlfriend at the time, was incredible.  If I called her at 4 a.m. that I needed popsicles, she would drive back to the hospital before going to work or school. Everyone went way above and beyond.

I remember missing the call from my doctor telling me about my results from an MRI earlier that day after my first checkup.  I called back, but he was in surgery. The nurse called me and I was uneasy and fidgeting with everything around me. She told me something that I will forever remember.

“Don’t worry about something until the doctor gives you something to worry about.”

That comment stuck with me years later. I worked myself up over nothing because the next day the doctor called back saying I was cancer free.

After my surgery, I moved back up to Illinois to connect with my cousins, aunts and uncles. I married my wife, had one son, and just had another baby last week. The experience gave me the belief that I could do anything. That I could beat anything. It removed any fear that I had; it changed the way I could accomplish things. I survived a 50/50 chance of living past five years and have long surpassed that expiration date. My last chemo treatment was in July 2006 and major surgery was May 2008. I now have annual checkups and have been cancer free for nearly ten years.