“Your cancer is back, we’re 80% sure, but we need to run some tests first just to be sure. We would have to start quemo again right away cause relapses are regularly worst” were the words that came out of my oncologist’s mouth while I was sitting in her office. After 3 years fighting and living with the decease you think you’ve gotten used to bad news. You think that at this point, it won’t matter you can take it and move on. But, how can you get used to hearing “you have cancer” one of the most horrible, frightening news a human can get and not flinch. Well you don’t you just learn how to cope with them a little better. You tell your story so many times, that it becomes that, it becomes a story, tale about somebody else, because just the thought of the horrible thing’s you had work through is too hard to bare. Like if it were a way to detach yourself from those feelings. As I walked out of the doctor’s appointment, all sorts of things where running through my head like nascar cars while I was listening to my mom say how lucky and grateful I should feel to being alive and kicking, how this is nothing for me because I’m strong, I’m a warrior. About how I will continue life normally and that hair is JUST hair. As I was listening to her, trying to convince myself that I was right, that I was okay, I realized, I really wasn’t. I was mad, because I was finally feeling like myself, confident, independent, free. I was starting to not feel like a patient. And for the first time in year that’s exactly how I felt, like a patient, a fragile human being full of worries and uncertainty. Cancer has changed everything, I lost friends that didn’t know how to stay and others that didn’t want to invest their time on staying, it left me with scars all over my body, it took half my lung, it affected my performance, it made me a 60 y/o women in the body of a 23 y/o that suffers from CFS, PTSD, memory loss, weight gain, neuropathy, insomnia and irritable stomach, that cries herself to sleep almost every day. I am not a warrior, I didn’t choose to fight this battle, I’ve been strong because I’ve had to, to survive, for my family and for the few friends that stayed. My life will not continue normally, because I will have to start from scratch. I will have to put my life on hold or slow down the projects that I’ve been working so hard on. I will have to fight the already unbearable fatigue, hemorrhoids and depression. I will not be able to see myself in the mirror, because I can’t recognize myself. My hair will fall along my lashes and my eyebrows, I will have the stamp again as the girl with cancer, I will have to handle the stares, the ignorant comments. I’ll put on wigs, lashes and paint my eyebrows, to make people less uncomfortable, to not walk on eggshells around me. So, NO IT’S NOT “JUST HAIR, it will grow back” it will fall in chunks making a mess everywhere, I will look like a mad scientist and turn to head shaving. It will grow uneven and it will take years for me to feel comfortable with it. I am not ungrateful because I feel mad, sad and disappointed, because my life has just been flipped upside down again. I’m not less strong because I’m scared of going to an exhausting war that takes millions of lives everyday and I am certainly not vain or stupid because I’m mourning my hair because it will take away the normalcy that I’ve been fighting so hard to have. I am grateful, I am lucky, I am strong, and I will be okay. But I’m also mad at my body for betraying me (as crazy as that might sound”, I am strong, but I am also scared of living for the rest of my life with cancer as my Damocles sword. In the meantime I AM NOT OK and that, well that’s ok.