The Eye of the Storm

I wanted to share this beautiful story Kaylah wrote. She is a fighter and I was touched by her words. I have the honor of knowing her and being a part of her family.

The Eye of the Storm

Kaylah Talamantez

To me, everything is just a big storm. And when you’re in a storm, you don’t see all the beautiful things around until you take a step back. You don’t notice the alluring silver breaks between the clouds. When you’re in a stormy situation you don’t always see all the positive things that can and have happened. There are always undeniable factors in life. It may not seem like anything ever gets better, but there’s always sunshine in a storm somewhere, you just have to search for it. I believe that you need to look through the eye of the storm to see the beauty.

When I was four years old I was diagnosed with cancer. Everything started out with just a stuffy nose, then a small fever. It wouldn’t go away. Days went by, then it turned into weeks, and then those weeks turned into months. My mom took me to the clinic and doctor after doctor told us to give me antibiotics. Finally, one doctor in Mount Vernon said I had polyps in my nasal cavity and that we needed to go to Seattle Children’s Hospital to have it removed. This was a turning point in my life and the storm is just starting to build its way up. I knew everything was going to change.

Everyone was so petrified. I was four years old and I had Embryonal Rhadbomyosarcoma. I had to go through ten months of intense IMRT (Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy), radiation and chemotherapy. My life had just begun and I had to fight to stay alive. I had to make the best out of it. I had a saying that I told people because many people stared at me. That saying was, “bald is beautiful.” I had found the doctors emergency button and used it all the time. When the nurse came running in, I would just ask for some ice cream. We tried to live life as normal as possible.

Then it was a waiting game. There were many questions being asked. Will it get worse? Will it not? Will I survive? That was over nine years ago. Today, I am thirteen years old, healthy, and doing well. Everything was going so great until on day I came home and my dad told my brothers and I that he was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Follicular Lymphoma. It means that it’s treatable but not curable. It will go away, but it will come back. I had thought that because I survived then he wouldn’t. As if I jinxed it and it would be partially my fault if he didn’t make it. But the ship made it through the storm and everything turned around. It’s been three months since his cancer has been gone.

Now we’re just waiting for it to come back and we will fight through it again. We don’t know when it will come back, it could be tomorrow or it could be fiver years. I know he’s strong and he will make it just as good as the ship made it through the last time. I pray to God every day for children and their families who have had cancer, those that have survived, and many others who have not. Everyone can make it through every storm in life. “The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow