Quien Sabe (Who Knows)

Hodgkin’s. Cancer. Me. 30. Why?

I was diagnosed on April 27, 2009; it was a Monday, the start of a week. Since then, especially the week after I found out, this question inevitably crossed my mind.

Why?

I had probably had Hodgkin’s lymphoma for over a year. My body, our beautiful, wondrous constructions—one that has, in part, turned against itself— first told me that something was awry in late June of 2008 with a swollen lymph node by my left clavicle. An array of medical practitioners—doctors, radiologists, surgeons, pathologists, and pulmonologists—ran a number of tests to try and determine what was wrong with me. During those months, when I arrived to those appointments, lugging my backpack with my bicycle helmet strapped to it, I think I fooled them all, along with my family, friends, and myself. I appeared healthy, strong, displaying none of the “B” symptoms—the more serious ones—and there is no history of cancer in either of my parents’ families. How could I possibly have cancer, though with time, after all the examinations and two biopsies came back “negative” or “non-diagnostic,” it began to make more and more sense?

Hodgkin’s disease, now called Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was first described back in 1832 by Thomas Hodgkin, an English physician. 177 years later, the medical field still has little idea what causes this blood cancer. Though it was comforting to finally know what was wrong with me, especially since it’s a very treatable disease, it has been unsettling, not knowing how it happened—what caused it, so I can know what I need to change.

This hasn’t, however, deterred me from coming up with a slew of theories: could my disease, which is between my lungs and spread to my left chest, have originated from the Teflon plate that was inserted in my body and fused with my chest plate when I was fourteen? Could the electromagnetic radiation emitted from my cell phone somehow have reacted with it in order to create a toxic environment within my chest? Was it from the marijuana I smoked the past few years? From the cigarettes I puffed on occasion? Was my body simply too sensitive to it? Or did I somehow get it from the Nalgene plastic bottle I had for years, the one that had these strange white flecks floating in the water, even after I washed it out—the same bottle the company pulled off the shelves in 2008 because of fears that a chemical used to make them caused cancer and increased the risks of other serious health problems? Was it all those bad leftovers I ate over the years? Should I have refrained from eating scraps of food that fell on the floor? Was the five-second rule a bad one to heed? Was it all those years of chewing my fingernails, even my toenails? Was it from sniffing all those Mr. Sketch and dry-erase markers? Did someone lay a curse on me!?

Or is my mother right—that this is a “test from God”, an opportunity to look up to the sky and acknowledge that He exists? Could there actually be such a sick god—male, female, or hermaphadite—that is so greedy, so in need of my miniscule attention and belief? Could she be right? Am I “wrong” in my atheistic belief, as she says, part of the losing team?

Can’t she see why I don’t want to believe this, that I want to hold out some hope that there might be a God, and that she is just, not wrathful, beautiful, not jealous? Can’t she understand that a part of me, like never before, wants to believe? That sometimes when I see the mural of Jesus, beaming, arms held open before a flock of children on the bus ride to my chemo treatments that I want to be one of those kids, basking from his love? Doesn’t she understand that I want to believe but can’t because my faith in anything must be founded in logic?

Or might my disease—whom I call Mr. Hodgkins (because this conquistador, like all the ones in our collective history, have always been men, not women)— be a masterful concoction, born of the “suicide impulse” that even my girlfriend of five months has already recognized within me? Throughout my adult life there have been times—however fleetingly—when I haven’t cared about living (which is different from wanting to die), when all the destruction and suffering I see, read, and feel from this world is too much, when I’ve seen little point in continuing to be a part of this evolution. Could Mr. Hodgkins have bloomed during one of these moments? Was the rest of my body too weak to fend off this treacherous act?

I no longer ask myself why, though it hasn’t stopped my curiosity. I’m not sure if there is a why. At this point, I think there is only a “who knows”.

The one thing I am certain of, the one thing this “journey” has taught me is: I just want to live so much.