My Cancer Survivor Story: You Will Get Through It
It won’t always be like this.
That’s what I want you to know. I never really think about the times that I had cancer, and I have had a lot of cancer. I was 3 years old when I was diagnosed with Wilms tumor. The cancer came back when I was 6, this time in my lung. It returned again in my lung when I was 7. And then, in my 50s, I had breast cancer.
Because people weren’t accepting of her appearance, Pritchett wore what she describes as “the most hideous wig.”
Getting through the treatments
I remember many of the treatments I had as a child. The chemotherapy. The radiation. The surgeries. I remember visiting doctor after doctor, and I remember taking lots of medicine.
That was a difficult time. Cancer treatments are rarely easy, and treatments back then weren’t what they are today. I remember the chemotherapy. It was before they had ports, which meant I had to get stuck every time I visited. The chemo burned my muscle tissue. One time, my vein blew, and the chemo leaked out.
And they didn’t have good anti-nausea medicines back then. I could always tell when I was going to get sick, and I felt like I was going to get sick all the time. I would try to prepare myself, thinking, "No, I'm OK now. I'm not going to be sick." Sometimes that would work. Sometimes it wouldn’t.
People weren’t very accepting of how I looked back then, either. In the 1960s, nobody went around without hair. It wasn’t accepted the way it is today. So, I wore the most hideous wig. It had bangs, and the hair was curly on the ends.
My favorite time was when we went to the river with friends. I'd stick my wig on a cone-shaped lamp, put my baseball cap on, and hang out with my friends, who did accept me without hair.
I hated being sick. I hated having cancer. I didn’t want to be in the hospital. I didn’t want to wear my wig. I wanted to go home.
"When you're going through something difficult, it feels like it will never end. It feels like the pain and suffering are going to last forever, and it will always be your life. But it won't. You will get through it. It won't always be like this."
Pritchett shares her experience with cancer when asked, but she’d much rather talk about her grandchildren and family.
Growing up and moving on
Eventually, I did get to go home. And all those experiences slowly became part of my past. I began to have new experiences and make new memories. I learned to ride a bike. I went shopping with my mom. I did a lot of the things other kids my age did.
When I got older, I got a job at NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I became a systems administrator in their Information Technology (IT) department.
We used to support experiments and the computers that would gather data from mission flights. Today, I am a technical lead for a group of about 13 other administrators, all men. I love the group I work with. We are all geeky IT people. It is the coolest job.
Living as a cancer survivor
And that’s life. It can be really cool, and it can be really terrible. I’d rather talk about all the cool stuff, but sometimes people do ask me about the terrible stuff. So, I share some of my experiences with them.
I understand their curiosity. I understand their sympathy. But I rarely revisit these memories on my own. I don’t ignore them because they are terrible. I simply don’t think about them because life goes on.
When you’re going through something difficult, it feels like it will never end. It feels like the pain and suffering are going to last forever, and it will always be your life. But it won’t. You will get through it. It won’t always be like this.
