Hi everyone,
I'm Sarah and I'm a Childhood Cancer Survivor. My story starts when I was five years old. I went into my parents' room one morning and said: "Mommy, my knee hurts" She said I would be fine and to go back to bed and I did so. My mother thought I just hurt myself on the playground or something. This pain persisted for two weeks and then I started Kindergarten and I was able to forget about the pain for a little bit. However on the second day of school I told my mother: "Mommy, I don't want to go to school tomorrow" Of course this worried my mother, and the next morning I awoke with a fever of 103 and my mother brought me to the ER at Carney Hospital in Brockton, Mass.
There I was diagnosed with osteyomitolytis which is an acute inflammation of the bone marrow. I stayed at that hospital for a week. When I wasn't better by the week's end the doctors did a biopsy on my right knee and that's when they found the leukemia cells and on Friday September 21st, 1990 I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

I could not be treated at Carney so, I was transferred to Floating Hospital for Children in Boston. I stayed at Floating for a month receiving high-dose chemotherapy, Prednisone, and many other medications. There are some bad things I remember from the hospital and some good things too. For me the scariest part of treatment was the spinal taps. I was not losing my hair or the surgery for the catheter in my chest but those painful needles. I was never scared of cancer; it was its treatments that frightened and sometimes still frighten me today. I've been in remission for 19 years and I am graduating from college in the spring and I plan to go to grad school for health psychology to become a hospital psychologist for girls and women with cancer. Cancer is not all of me but, I know if I didn't have cancer, I wouldn't be me.

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