Protecting my heart...

Dr. Saddle began talking, trying to explain what was found in the test results. To my dismay there were a lot of words used that I could not quite understand. I wasn’t a doctor, I was a 15 year old boy in high school, but there were a couple of words that he used that I would have liked for them to be the last thing that I understand. It's Growing…. Growing? Getting Bigger… Bigger?



If we get rid of it now, your symptoms may go away. What is it? It’s a tumor. Is it cancerous? No! If we don’t get it now it could cause dangerous problems down the line. It seems that you have a tumor forming on your Thymus gland. Thymus gland? I don't understand. Right now it is not that big, but it can grow bigger within a couple of months, even weeks. The tumor is growing right below your vocal cords and right above your heart. What it is doing right now is spreading to the point that if we do not take it out as soon as possible, it could infect portions of your vocal cord and they will have to be removed or worse grow big enough to attack your heart. If that was not enough, more problem lay ahead, it could wrap itself around you major artery and vein and that would create another problem in itself.



With all this information that Dr. Saddle was trying to tell me, I couldn’t help but think about what was in store for me. He said they would treat it like an open heart surgery. This is something I could not believe, why was this happening to me? He said “We will do everything that we can, to make this process easy for you to handle. Make it easy to handle? I don’t even want it? Do what you have to! I just want to be normal!