This may become a wall of text but here goes:
When I was 10-15 years old I really liked sports. I was really good at football. I got to play with kids 2-3 years older than me when I was 13 years old which is a pretty big difference at that age. I was also really good at running. Fastest 100m, 800m and 2.5km at my school, 4th fastest 2.5km in the municipality when I was 13. I know all of this isn't too incredible or out of the ordinary, I also know that no matter how good or bad I was, I absolutely loved it.
When I was 10 I was practicing football with my mom. My coach had told everyone on the team to practice using both feet. Me and my mom were passing the ball back and forth, switching feet each pass. Then something happens. I remember the pain even today. It's hard to explain what it felt like because I'd never felt anything like it. It was "pure". The most pure form of pain I've ever felt. It felt as if my entire body was frozen and burning up at the same time, it felt like my brain could only think about one thing and everything else was gone. My vision got blurry and I lost focus of everything. And then it goes away. It had only been a moment. I remember falling to the ground and grabbing my foot, but the pain was already gone. The football had struck at the center of my right foot and for some reason caused me the most intensive pain I've ever felt.
It got worse each year. I would get the same kind of pain every now and then, on top of that each step started hurting a little bit. By the time I was 13 the pain was constant. The "attacks" got more frequent and the constant pain got exhausting. After the 2.5km race I couldn't walk for a couple of days without crutches. I was disappointed that I hadn't finished 1st and I was in a lot of pain, I figured that if I couldn't even be the best in the municipality and that if the pain was going to be this bad then why do I even bother, I decided to quit. I didn't quit football immediately. I felt that I would be letting down my teammates. I really loved that game. The teamwork, the competitiveness, the passion of it all. The tipping point to me quitting was that I stopped feeling that I was helping the team. I had to walk of the field multiple games in a row in order to avoid further pain. My coach would call me pretty much every week for the next 6 months trying to get me back on the team. Telling him no was incredibly frustrating because I really wanted to play but the pain just wasn't worth it.
Besides quitting football and running I started spending less and less time with my friends. They always wanted to do stuff outside but my foot was too painful, I spent more and more time playing video games. The past years I had seen many doctors and none of them found anything wrong. My doctors were telling me that there was nothing wrong so my friends were calling me a liar, I was faking it so that I could play video games. My gym teacher would push me really hard because he saw that I had talent, but for some reason on certain days I didn't want to do anything. I started lying about the pain and started hiding it. The pain kept getting worse and worse, I started skipping school just so that I could avoid walking. I felt locked inside my own body, I had so many things I wanted to do but the pain would interfere with that.
A couple of months before I turned 15 I went to another hospital. I wasn't too excited. The pain is real but for some reason nobody else can see it. This doctor touched my foot and gets surprised with how much I flinch. She feels it again and she tells me and my mom that there is definitely something there. My mom gets pretty scared, the doctor tells her that it's probably something minor. We get sent to another hospital which was more fit to look at me. They stick needles directly into my foot for testing, at the time this was the most pain I had ever been in. It felt as if somebody would take your foot by the toes and bend it to your heel and slowly roll it further down, it also caused the same exact pain as my previous "attacks". After this they did an MRI, test my blood and a bunch of stuff.
We get called in about a week later and we see yet another doctor. The doctor is really tall, had a really firm handshake, he looked extremely confident and happy. He starts going on about surgery, rehab and a bunch of stuff. Apparently there was a blood vessel tumor (basically a buildup of blood) the size of a tennis ball located in my foot. Based on the blood work and the MRI they said that it has been growing for approximately 5 years. He tells me that it's completely fine and the surgery isn't complicated at all, there is nothing to worry about. I ask him if I'm going to be alright, will I be able to do sports again, can I start with football. He tells me that I can expect the pain to be gone and that approximately 6 months after the surgery I should be completely and fully recovered. I'm thinking about one thing, and only one thing. Football. You can't imagine what that day felt like. You have no idea. The constant pain, the constant exhaustion, my inability to pursue my passions, they had all been promised to be taken cared of at the same time. I haven't felt happiness like I did on that day ever before. I would be able to return to football but this time without the pain.
The next two weeks I view as the best two weeks of my life, the pain was still there, but who gives a fuck, it's about to be taken cared of. I walked around school with the biggest shit eating grin you've ever seen. My friends and everybody who called me a liar we're really upset with themselves for not believing in me, most visibly my gym teacher who felt incredibly bad for having pushed me so hard.
After those two weeks we go back to the hospital to remove the stitches. We see the same doctor as last time, he doesn't look very happy today. He tells me that the inital tests showed that the tumor was blood vessel tumor but after closer examination they have been able to confirm that it's synovial sarcoma. Synovial sarcoma is a rare form of cancer, he told me that about 7 people in Sweden (I'm swedish btw) get diagnosed with it every year, which isn't too big of a number for a country with 9 million people. I see tears running down my moms face and her face in that moment will forever be burnt into my eyes. I didn't cry at all. I decided that I would treat this as a challenge, people survive cancer all the time, there's no way I'm going to die, my 15th birthday is coming up for fucks sake. I zoned out while the doctor was talking about more surgeries, chemo therapy, radiation therapy and the treatment that I would go through. 6 months of chemo followed by 2 months of radiation therapy. It's just 1 year away from school, right??
I didn't cry that day and I decided that I would stay strong for my family, I wouldn't show any weakness. Everything is and will be alright, I'm going to be the same happy kid as I've always been and cancer won't define me. They go ahead with the first surgery a couple of days later. They enter through my groin and sever the blood flow and nerves to my leg. They used a device similar to a pace maker to pump very strong chemo into my leg, the leg got to about 45C which is why severing the blood flow and nerves was very important. They pumped it for 5 hours. I wouldn't recover from this. It's possible that I wouldn't ever feel my leg again.
A week later I start chemo. A week after that I'm laying in my bed in the worst state I'd ever been in. I couldn't eat, I could barely sleep, I threw up at the thought of food or at the slightest bit of exertion. My entire body was burning up. I couldn't feel my leg. That's when I cried the first time since I got the diagnosis. I didn't last more than two weeks. I cried myself to sleep because at that moment I realized that sure, I may survive this, but I will never play football again. I will never run properly again. I couldn't cope with this and to this day it bothers me. What if I never had cancer? What if I had kept playing sports? Who would I be today?
I turned 21 two days ago and I can feel my leg and my foot just fine, unfortunately most of what I feel with those is pain. I just got done working an 8 hour shift with a pay of about $30 an hour which is kind of nice. Unfortunately I can't run and my foot is in a lot of pain right now. I still lie to my friends and hide it. They ask why I walk weird and I tell them it's just some old injury. Most of my friends don't know I've had cancer, those who know barely know anything. I'm just the funny dude at parties who plays video games when he's not working. Thanks for reading.