From the Soccer Field to the Hospital

When I was twelve, my knowledge of the world was very limited. I can openly admit this with no shame.

However, I wasn’t completely clueless.

In the first decade of my life, I lived with an alcoholic father and went through my parents’ divorce. I understood that I had food allergies and that being exposed to chemicals made me feel sick. I knew I was tough, athletic, a book nerd, the outdoors, and animals, and photography.

And, there was something I knew with absolute certainty: 

I LOVED soccer more than anything in the entire world. 

As she was escorted off the field, I remained on the ground, unable to move or breathe. It was more than just getting the wind knocked out of me. The pain was excruciating. I felt like my torso was about to burst. An instant migraine came on. 

I had been going for the past several days with severe pain in my abdomen. I had been experiencing headaches, lack of energy, and nosebleeds. Brushing my hair had even seemed like a monumental effort. 

But I had thought that I was just fighting off the flu or something. So I still played in that soccer game. I refused to miss out on my favorite activity. I was tolerating my discomfort until I took that illegal hit. 

I lay there on the ground, immobile, waiting for the pain to pass, but it refused to lighten up. 

The refs helped me up, and I limped off the field, clutching my stomach. 

I remember some guy calling me a wimp for crying. This infuriated me. I never cried about pain. Being tough was a quality I prided myself on since elementary school. At that age, I played soccer with the boys while the other girls stood to the side, wearing skirts and playing hopscotch. The nurse was dressing my cuts, scrapes, and bruises every other day. 

But I had never felt this kind of pain before. I distantly knew something else was wrong, but I chose to ignore it. 

Agrily, I dried my tears. I took a few moments, sitting on the sideline. The pain refused to fade. I didn’t care. Being my stubborn self, I pulled myself shakily to my feet and insisted on being put back in the game. It was killing me to be off the field for even a minute. My coach, and everyone else within earshot, refused. 

There was a mutual agreement among all the bystanders that I needed a doctor. 

I hated walking away from that game, the sounds of the crowd cheering growing distant.

I knew my team needed me to be on the field with them. 

I needed to be on that field for myself. 

My mom took me to the hospital in Woodland Park. They checked me in and took my blood. We were immediately sent down to a hospital in Colorado Springs for an overnight stay. 

I can still picture the color of the walls, recall the smell of hand sanitizer and sterile wipes, and see the little, white teddy bear resting on the pillow of the bed. 

I sat on the bed in my hospital room and took off my beloved shin guards and soccer cleats. I stacked them nicely by my bed so that they would be ready to go for tomorrow’s soccer practice. 

One night, I told myself. Just one game. You will be back tomorrow. 

I was oblivious as to why I was there. I had no idea why my blood testing required a night in a hospital. I assumed that hospitalization was a normal protocol.

That next morning, I awoke to find an unusual number of medical staff in my room. 

I remember when my doctor sat on my bed, took my hand, and said: “You have leukemia”. It wasn’t until she said that my blood was 80% cancer—that all of my main organs were swollen with it and I would be dead within a week— that I understood I was dying. 

It’s a disconcerting thing, having a period of time in your life that you can’t recall no matter how hard you try. I have little to no recollection of the events that took place right after the moment of my diagnosis. 

I have no memory of the nurses placing an IV and wheeling me away for my port-placement surgery. I can’t recall the moment that they gave me my first chemo treatment.

Here, I do get a portion of my memory back, because I remember going into a state of drug-induced psychosis. That is the last thing I remember before falling into a coma.

I do remember waking up a week later. 

And I wish more than anything that I could forget that moment— that I could forget how I felt upon waking. 

I didn’t know much about myself…

But when I woke up, there was one thing that I knew for certain: I had never been in so much pain in my entire life. What I felt when I was body-slammed in my last soccer game was nothing compared to what I was feeling.

Head to toe, my entire body felt like it had been lit on fire after being hit by a bus that also happened to instill me with an amplified version of the flu upon impact. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet.

I was so weak, I could barely move. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to exist. I was in a new world, and it was a world where I felt like I was dying a slow, horrible death. 

Somewhere in those initial days, as I lay writhing on my hospital bed, wishing for the pain to cease, I started crying and said to my mom “I want to go play soccer. When can I play soccer?”. 

I remember her shaky smile, the fear in her eyes, and her response: “soon, love.”

But a distant part of me knew better. 

I didn’t know much about me or my life when I was twelve. I didn’t know that my body was reacting worse to chemo than my doctors ever expected. I didn’t know that they thought my chemotherapy would kill me if my cancer didn’t.

I had no clue that the physical effects of chemotherapy would cause me to lose everything that mattered to me and steal my ability to do everything I loved.

I didn’t know that leukemia would steal my chance of ever being a professional athlete of any kind. 

I never figured out what happened to the cleats and shinguards that I placed by my bed that first night in the hospital. They seemed to have disappeared—almost as if the world knew I wouldn’t be using them again. 

There was a lot I didn’t know when I was a kid.

But during those first few weeks in the hospital, I learned something new:

The world I knew and everything I knew about it had been replaced with one where I lost what mattered to me most and where it hurt to exist. 

And it was only the beginning.