What's so special about the number 21?

Why would I torture people with my writing for 21 days? 

I joined this movement “It Takes Guts – 21 Day Challenge” to be mindful about a disease that is unfortunately very close to my heart.  Most people have never heard of it and never will.  Your chances of meeting someone with it are, if my statistics skills serve me well, about 1:50,000 to 1:250,000.  Basically, you’ll probably never know anyone with it.  If you know me, then you’ve met one.  I have Familial Adenomatous Polyposis.  It’s a really fancy medical term for someone who grows a ton (usually on the order of several hundred to thousands) of polyps, AKA extra tissue, along the length of their large intestine.  Polyps also grow in the small bowel, near the pancreas and these polyps also turn into cancer.  These wart like overgrowths eventually turn into cancerous tissue, and if untreated, will cause death.  People like me are genetic freaks who have a tiny little mistake on the 5^th chromosome in each and every cell of their bodies.  This mistake doesn’t allow the body to make a protein that tells the cells in your large intestine and small intestine to stop growing.  The cells decide to grow and grow and grow one day and when they do that, they screw up and eventually make a mistake, causing them to invade other tissues, and this is where the cancer begins to have lots of fun destroying plenty of other stuff in your body.

Beyond the stupid stuff that FAP causes in our small and large bowels, it also sometimes likes to make brain tumors, liver tumors, adrenal tumors (that’s right on top of your kidneys), and thyroid tumors, and the weirdest and most unusual tumor – one of the rarest tumors a nerdy pathologist will ever see- desmoid tumors.  These are like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” out of control kind of tumors.  They just keep getting bigger, and more ridiculous each day.  They’ve been known to swallow whole organs and bundle muscle and fat into a nice little ball of concrete located right inside your stomach wall, making you look like you are birthing one of those ugly aliens from the 80’s movie “Alien”.

Now that you are sufficiently bored or disgusted, I will go on to tell you that the only way to survive this disease is to have a lot of tests and some surgeries, sometimes just a few and sometimes a lot more.  At the age of 8, I was unfortunate enough to get diagnosed with this disease.  In order to not get colon cancer, I had surgery at 9 to remove my large intestine.  It didn’t really go as planned and I had some extra surgery.  At 11, I saw and felt a very large growth in my abdomen where my surgical site was.  I was found to have a desmoid tumor and successfully had it totally resected.   Eight abdominal surgeries after my initial one, I am healthy at this point.  I feel thankful to be well and safe from the polyps in my large and small bowel that would have killed me.  I most certainly feel like a survivor because I haven’t missed out on anything in my life.  The definition of a survivor in my opinion is one who keeps living and keeps doing and keeps moving forward.  I don’t look back on it often, I don’t think about it often, and I certainly never think of myself as a victim or a patient.  I don’t think I’m incredible or exceptional.  I just think I’ve dealt with something that I had no choice but to deal with.  Anyone else would do the same. 

21 means something to me.  During my first surgery and hospital stay at 8 years old, where I turned 9 in my hospital bed, I stayed exactly 21 days in that ugly, sterile room.  During that 21 days, I went through a profound transformation.  I was only 8, turning 9, but I remember so much of how I felt.  It’s something I never talk about.  Talking and writing about those days is hard and not something I want to do.  But I’ll do it to bring attention to a disease I feel passionate about, and even more, to try to make people understand that strangely, beauty can come out of suffering.