Ten Years Ago, Ten Years From Now

10 years ago this month, I was a fifteen-year-old walking home from school in Japan. I was surprised to find my dad at home in the middle of the work day. He met me at the door and I immediately knew that something was very, very wrong.

Doctors had found a large tumor growing behind my thirteen-year-old sister’s eye. She had rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare childhood cancer, and it had already progressed to stage 4.

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This month, I sent my twenty-three-year-old sister a small bunch of flowers. They arrived at an apartment door where she lives downtown, instead of to a headstone. The past ten years saw radiation and chemotherapy treatments, lost hair, countless hormone imbalances, atrophied leg muscles, months of physical therapy, impaired vision, tutors for a school year spent in the hospital, injections every day (to this day).

They also saw learning to walk again, high school and college graduations, good friends, a first job, family vacations, opportunities of a lifetime and a remission that by all accounts will likely last until she is a sassy grey-haired lady.

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In times when the fight seemed like it would be lost, and that there was no end in sight, I wish I could have seen what I know now. That in the end, she lives; that she thrives. That there is second life after terrible darkness. This is my hope for all of the young girls (and boys) who are at this very moment fighting a different kind of heartbreaking battle, and my hope for those who are fighting it with them.

Happy 2010! Here’s to what's possible in the years to come.

Photo by harold.lloyd