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I’m not writing this for people to look and feel sorry for me. I’m writing it because I need to have it down somewhere. I need it out of my head and somewhere physical. It’s completely raw and I have little care for the words that I use during it. I’m sure you’ll understand why once you’ve read it.

I don’t understand why I can’t get better. I don’t understand why the 14 chemotherapy drugs that I’ve been on over the years have failed or why I gave up half my leg to get better, because I’m still not fucking better. Apparently being scarred, poked, burned, cut open and poisoned isn’t enough to get rid of cancer, oh no. I’m sick, tired and fed up of it. I’m tired of being given false hope because someone hasn’t properly looked at my results. “The chemo’s working!” “There’s improvement!” “You’re doing well!”. The same phrases I’ve heard time after time and yet I still find myself having to go for treatment every week because this disease is relentless. Osteosarcoma, I hadn’t even heard of it and now my entire life revolves around it because it’s crept its way through every part of my body. When does it ever end? Apparently it doesn’t for me.

The feeling of being this age and knowing that I’m not going to grow up properly or have a family, I won’t see my friends accomplish their goals all because cancer decided that I can’t have that privilege. I can’t have the simple pleasure of being with my friends because I’m going to die.

Today my doctor asked me to choose between quality of life or longevity. I can stop treatment and live without the side effects of chemo and radiotherapy but I’ll have between 3 months and a year to live if I chose to do that. The other option is to continue with treatment knowing that it may not sustain my life for any longer and will make me feel like shit. There is a chance that it may tackle my cancer enough to try another method of treatment which would then put me into remission, but that isn’t guaranteed.

So here I am.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know the best decision and I don’t know how to make it either. All I know right now, is that I want to be around people. I just want to be around the people who care about me. I don’t want to just disappear and for people to forget about me, it’s such a selfish motivation and I feel horrible for even saying it. There are people who I want to get closer to but I’m scared to do it in case I hurt them if something was to happen. I want to spend time with the people who have just come into my life because without them, I don’t know what I would do. I just want to enjoy my life without being scared of cancer because that’s all I’ve been frightened of for the last eight years. I don’t want to sound like I’m wallowing in my own self pity but right now, I can’t even think about what I’m doing tomorrow because I’m so frightened of this decision. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave the people I love behind. I don’t want to be alone in this and I’m scared.