Delilah
We are not diagnosed with a deadly disease, we are merely interrupted. I learned that
more than 4,800 kids between the ages of 0-19 years are diagnosed with a brain tumor each year.
Unfortunately I was one of those kids. For many, high school is the best time of your life. For me
that was not the case. Brain cancer is a disease of the brain where cancer cells grow in the tissue.
When someone has brain cancer there are many different side effects. My problems was seizures,
and the medicine was not working.
It is so rare, why did it have to happen to me? I asked myself that question a lot my senior
year of high school when I was diagnosed with stage one cancer. I was experiencing what we
now know as absent seizures. I had been experiencing them since my sophomore year of high
school. I went to the doctor and they told me nothing was wrong. The seizures got worse, and
finally I couldn't take it anymore and went back to the doctors my senior year and that is when
they found the tumor. I was so scared. I was such a normal kid. I was on the varsity cheerleading
team, I had a part time job and it was my senior year of high school. I was supposed to be having
the time of my life before I went off to college in the fall. I was so fearful of what was going to
happen to me because at that point I did not know what was going to happen to me.
My illness made a big bump in my life and the lives of everyone around me. When we
first found out about the tumor we named it. Its name was Delilah. We were trying so hard to
make this as easy as possible to get through. Every few weeks I was getting MRI’s to see if
Delilah was growing. I was on a very horrible medication called keppra. It was to help with my
seizures. The most common side effects of keppra were, aggression and anger, depression,
change in personality, rapid changing moods and headaches. I had all of those symptoms. I
changed. It went from being the worst time in my life to even worse. My friends were starting to
not talk to me. I was pushing everyone away and sleeping a lot. I was always so tired and drained
and losing my friends. Our last trip to Boston before...
