by Benjamin Potts
It was the first thursday of the school year. It was a hot one for sure, especially on the track. Of course, that was the day my teacher decided to go for a run. “GO” my instructor yelled, I took my time with a good pace. Then all of the sudden, something came over me. A wave of dizziness and nausea casted over me like a mother throwing a blanket over her child for an extra layer on a cold night. I collapsed, and started vomiting and convulsing on the ground. I was shaking vigorously. The nurse guided me into a wheelchair and rushed me to the office where she left me in the bathroom while she called my family. My mother quickly drove me to the hospital near by and the conclusion the doctor came to was that it was dehydration. Then, there was this nurse practitioner who looked at me funny and thought something didn’t seem right. She ordered a chest x-ray which revealed two masses. One was further up my vertebral column near my cervical vertebrae while the other one was on a vessel between my heart and my spine. When my family and I found out we cried for a while. Then, I was sick of the sadness and completely turned my attitude around. I started making jokes, like naming my tumors Tony and Tammy. After, a large amount of tests the determined it wasn’t cancer, but they still didn’t know what it was.
So it began, what kind of disease do I have? It’s not cancer but it’s somewhat spreading like it because I have two tumors of different sizes. So whatever it was, had to be in my bloodstream. I had a diagnostic team filled with oncologists in the best pediatric hospital in the world trying to determine what I had. They came up empty handed, until it came to my family history. My father had a tumor the size of a football growing inside