My Run-In with “Cancer”

I sat in my room at 4 in the morning re-thinking my life and the way I chose to live it.

Art and text by Myca Garrett

“I had a run-in with cancer.” 

Whenever I tell people this I get one of three reactions: 

“Oh, no—what kind?”

“I’m so sorry—are you okay now?”

or “Oh my god—when did you find out?”

So then I have to tell them that this run-in with cancer wasn’t really cancer at all, but a different sort of malignancy. Like a tumor, it metastasized to every inch of my body, and started interfering with how I live my everyday life. 

August 20, 2022. It is a beautiful Saturday evening in Oxford, Ohio. I am with my dad and his wife, Kylie—they’re sitting on the couch, and I’m sitting in the rocking chair, in their living room, and we’re watching my favorite TV show, Rick and Morty. I’ve just started to eat solid foods again after getting braces two weeks earlier (if you have ever had braces, you know the pain) and we have a fresh, warm homemade pepperoni pizza in front of us. 

I take a bite of pizza and start to swallow and a little bit of food gets stuck in my throat. I quickly set my plate on the coffee table and chug a glass of water in hopes of forcing the food down my esophagus, but I can still feel “the food” in my throat. I am embarrassed; I don’t want to make a big deal of it. So I pick up my phone, go straight to Google, and type in “how to dislodge food from the throat.” I follow the few suggestions I find. I take exaggerated deep breaths and try to hum a song just to reassure myself that I can still breathe.

But “the food” is still there. 

Now I’m sweating like a madman, even though I’m shivering from the box fan blowing on me. My heart is racing. I have my phone ready to call 911. I stay in this state of panic for twenty minutes until the anxiety is too much to bear so I turn to my dad and whisper, “He-ey d-d-dad, It-think I’m choking.”

My dad raises his eyebrows and calmly asks, “Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

“No I can still breathe,” I say. “But I feel like there is a little bit of food stuck in my throat!”

He picks up his phone and we start Googling together. I find something called Globus Sensation:  “A feeling or sensation that something is stuck or lodged in the back of your throat.” The site says “drinking a carbonated beverage will help relieve the sensation.” My dad goes to the fridge and grabs me a LaCroix, and I chug half of it. Nothing changes, so I chug the rest of it, and force myself to puke in the sink.

And it was only going to get worse from there.

I went to sleep that night relieved that I wasn’t really choking and hoping that the feeling in my throat would go away. But when I woke up the next day, I was immediately disappointed. The globus sensation was still there. And now I had a new concern—I felt like I couldn’t swallow any solid foods. I tried and tried for that whole week, but I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried I felt like I was choking. I was afraid someone would have to perform the Heimlich Maneuver on me. I tried everything —spaghetti, chicken noodle soup, peanut butter and jelly, pancakes. Meal after meal had to go into the trash because I felt like I physically could not swallow solid food. My mom and I finally agreed that I needed to go to the doctor.

When the doctor came in I said “I know I am not supposed to Google stuff, but I found something called a ‘globus sensation.’” I explained to him what globus sensation was, and he said:  “Don’t go talking to Dr. Google—she doesn’t know anything. And ignore this Dr. Clovis or whoever.” 

He looked inside my mouth and said, “It’s just some post-nasal drip, take some Claritin and it should be fine.”

I saw two more doctors, and they said essentially the same thing: “It’s just allergies.”

But it wasn’t just allergies. I could see how not eating was affecting me physically and emotionally. In three weeks I lost fifteen pounds. I was a go-kart driver at the time and my kart and I had to make a minimum weight to race. Each week for three weeks we had to add an extra five pounds to the kart. My racing suit was hanging off me.

With the all the doctor’s appointments, I missed almost two weeks of school. I went from a 4.2 GPA to a 3.8. I couldn’t eat lunch, and I couldn’t eat at my friend’s house. I wasn’t making this up. My parents were worried for me. They saw all these changes and they just wanted me to eat something!

So I turned back to Dr. Google and its trusty sidekick, MayoClinic.org. I typed in “why am I having trouble swallowing.” The first three results gave me a new word: “Dysphagia.” Click on that and you find that dysphagia is a major sign of esophageal cancer. 

I was worried before—now I was terrified.

For the next week all I could think was I HAVE CANCER! At first I sat in my room at 4 in the morning completely re-thinking my life and the way I choose to live it. As time went on I began staying up and watching Dave Chappelle and other famous comedians on my phone as an escape. I figured if I laughed hard enough I would stop worrying and “Googling” information. 

I felt a constant threat looming over me, but I still told people not to worry about me. I was a walking contradiction, but I didn’t talk to anyone about that, either.

It’s almost a month later on a Wednesday and I get to school late, thanks to another doctor appointment. I walk straight to my fourth period class to find the classroom empty, except for my teacher, Mr. Brainard. He asks me why I’m there, reminds me that it’s a late start day so this is my lunch hour.

Maybe I’m feeling embarrassed to have forgotten what day it is, maybe I’m just tired of carrying all this fear around for so long, but I start telling him everything that has happened over the past month. I end the conversation with the biggest concern of all: “I did a little research and found out the problem with my throat might be cancer.”

Mr. Brainard listens, then says something like, “Well, if you do have cancer, that sucks, but I’m pretty sure you can go to mayoclinic.org and read that a stubbed toe could be a symptom of foot cancer.”

Not funny at all! What kind of rude person laughs at someone with cancer. Out of spite I type “Stubbed-toe cancer?” into Google. The first result is Mayo Clinic claiming that a stubbed toe can be a symptom of three kinds of foot cancer!

“Hey Mr. Brainard, look at this!” 

I show him the results and he chuckles. Suddenly I have a new perspective—maybe I am overreacting!

Fast forward another two weeks. I had an X-ray of my throat, a swallow study, and one endoscopy. The doctors concluded I had severe allergies and severe pharyngitis, and this damaged some nerves in the back of my throat, causing hypersensitivity. They say they see it most often in stroke victims. My body had started to adapt to eating soft foods. The treatment: no medication, no steroids (like those they had already given me) no chemo, no radiation. It was simply a matter of shoveling food down my throat and re-training my body to swallow these foods.

I’m relieved that the solution was so easy, although I’d hoped for something kind of cool. Not anything scary or life threatening—maybe something I could brag about to my friends at school. But I’m glad it’s all over.

My malignancy wasn’t cancer at all—it was fear. The cure was talking about it. While I could trust some of Google’s information, I could not trust Google’s lack of perspective. Mr. Brainard was the first person I talked to honestly about my fear, and he gave me a new way to look at my problem.

The whole experience sucked—I would never want anyone to go through what I went through. But I learned that when things like this happen, I need to find someone I can talk to. I need that second point-of-view to not feel so alone in it all. Then the cancerous feeling of fear can begin to ease.