This Star Won't Go Out

Then, 2 months ago, just a week or so away from another radio-iodine dose, I felt a large rumbling in my lower left/middle lung, and figured it was another wheeze. I was on the toilet peeing, so I breathed in and out and it rumbled a lot. I coughed, expecting mucus, and instead saw blood.

You don’t know what it felt like to look in my tissue and see blood. My heart thudded so fast, my stomach sunk and I got light-headed. I yelled for Mom, but I was so worried my voice cracked. She heard and Mom and Dad came running up. After coughing some more into a bowl, Dad took me to emergency. By then I was feeling fine, still unnerved, but fine. My oxygen was cranked up from 2 to 4, but I was fine, fine. I was checked in and they said I bled mainly because being off my thyroxin (in preparation for radio-iodine) my lung tumors had become über active.

A few days later I had my radio-iodine dose. I was fine for the first day. Second day I was headachey. Third day I was on a new air machine, “BiPAP,” and on morphine. I only remember sleeping, Mom came in and woke me and said Abby and Angie were there, so I drowsily hung out for a few minutes with them. Mom and Dad stayed in my room, sometimes switching and going out for a while because of my high radiation levels.

Apparently everyone highly, highly thought I was going to die. That’s why, despite such high levels of radiation, Mom and Dad spent so much time in my room, and Abby and Angie came to see me. But I didn’t know I was close to dying, I just figured because this dose of radiation was so much higher I was feeling quite sick.

Fortunately, praise God, I made it through! It wasn’t until like a week later, in the ICU where I was staying, that Mom told me about the dying thing. Hearing that made me think more about dying, death, heaven, hell. I’d always thought I knew how scary death was.

I thought you died, and then went to where you were supposed to go, but I didn’t think too hard about it. Now, being at a point in my life where doctors say I’ll live 6 days, or 6 months, or 6 years, or 60 years, they don’t know, I’ve had more time to say, if I died tomorrow, what would happen?

Even having all this time to think, I don’t think my views of death have changed too much. I guess now I figure you die, and then you have a sense of looking at your body from above, as Dad has said when we’ve talked about it. And then maybe you meet someone who takes you to where you go. Or maybe you’re already there, I don’t know. I wonder if anyone on earth’s idea of death is spot-on.


December 3, 2008


Since I’m sick, obviously, and in a way that really keeps me room bound most of the time, I don’t see many people. Part of that is that I don’t want to, so we ask people not to visit. I mean, who wants people they barely know to come into their house and be like, “How are you?”? That’s just weird stuff that has happened to me before. Haha :\

But I also feel like I’m cut off the world. One day a week ago or so, my best friend Alexa and my good friend Melissa who I met through North Carolina, came to visit for 3 hours. It was pretty awkward at first, but after a while it was so fun!

So I would like to have some form of human contact in my life, but the want for social stuff comes and goes spontaneously (if that’s how you spell it . . . ). Maybe one day we’ll figure this out.

. . .

Okay, so this is slightly embarrassing, but when I’m bored, (aka every second of every friggen hour) sometimes I film myself doing something on the computer and post it to . . . YOUTUBE!! How lame am I? Oh man, so lame. But so far I have an intro video, titled, what else?, “Intro to YouTube,” a “favorites” video where I show my favorite things, and now “That’s so Funny” where I talk about those annoying people who say “that’s so funny” all the time. Even when it’s not.

When Mom and Dad bought this journal for me (which I titled Daisy, though that may change), they also bought a sketch book where I’ve been drawing some stuff. Recently I drew an eye, eyebrow, nose and lips on a page. It’s supposed to look like half of her face, not many detailing on the nose and rest of face. I must say I’m really proud of the eye. I was thinking when I can’t think of what to write and the mood strikes, I’ll try to redraw it here.





December 5, 2008


Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Do you know what happened the day before yesterday? I had a migraine. Then yesterday I went to the hospital, where, by the way, Annette my nurse said, “Whose blood was drawn here? Your numbers look amazing!” :) After getting home I was so completely exhausted. Then later a migraine popped up. I took a 4 hour nap and then was up for a while when, another migraine popped up. Joy. I don’t know what’s causing them . . . tiredness? Chemo? Stress? Tumors? Ahrgh.