COVID-19 Took Away from My “Cancer Free” Celebration

I’ve been in my own little world of quarantine for six months now. I started getting sick in November, so I missed a lot of school and then low and behold on December 4th, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. That diagnosis didn’t leave a lot of room for social time. I was either asleep or in pain. I was watching my senior year of high school drift away before my eyes.

During the first month since the diagnosis I still got to have visitors come over to my house. I just had to hope that on those planned visit days, I didn’t ruin it by suddenly being too tired to move. Towards the end of the month was when I was set to get my first chemo treatment. Wouldn’t recommend it. After that is when the snowball started to roll. The more treatments I had the more immunosuppressed I became. I went from seeing people all the time and occasionally stopping by school to a hermit in a matter of weeks. People who came to our house couldn’t get too close to me or else one sneeze or cough could send me into hospitalization. My social life was exhilarating as you can tell. But, the one thing that made everything easier to get through was the thought that on April 3, my last day of treatment, I would be one day closer to everything being normal again. Boy was I wrong.

Jane with her friends on the first day of school

Before COVID-19 I was allowed around two visitors a week who would be greeted with a bottle of hand sanitizer, but at least I got to experience social contact. However, then came the shelter-in-place, fines, and lockdowns, that made it impossible for anyone to come visit. So my light at the end of a cancer-shrouded tunnel was getting dimmer and dimmer the closer I got.

The hardest part was that no one was allowed to visit me in the hospital the day of my last treatment when I got to ring the bell signaling that I’m cancer free. I got lots of claps and acknowledgement from strangers and my doctors, but no friends or extra family members allowed because we have to “flatten the curve.” How on earth was I supposed to see this coming? Your last day of treatment is supposed to be the greatest celebration and most gratifying day of victory, but I had to go home to an empty household with no one to hug.

This is all probably coming off as super selfish, but I just thought that after you go through something as tough as getting treated for cancer you would get to feel the world around change and a new chapter begin. I guess I didn’t even give a thought into the possibility of the world changing for the worse. I was supposed to have this freeing feeling once I was through with treatment where I could go back to school and see all my teachers and friends and finally experience a little normalcy again, but no. My life feels the exact same as it has for the last six months. Alone. At home. In my bed. For hours on end. I think the universe views my life as a joke. This is not how the end of my cancer treatment was supposed to go. Like woo-hoo I’m cancer free now but what do I even have to show for it. I guess at the end of it all, I just really hope the world can get back to normal by the summer time, so I can at least see all my friends before we leave for college. Maybe then, it will be like a send off of everything at once. Bye Galloway. Bye friends. Bye cancer.