Why I Relay

The 2014 Relay for Life will be held on April 5 at the Gordon Track. For more details, please visit http://www.relayforlife.org/harvarduniversity. By Sarah C. Cotterill

My first Relay for Life was in high school. I participated because of an all too common motivation amongst relayers—I’d lost friends and family to cancer. Strikingly, however, most of the people I lost to cancer were young.

Death is always a tragedy, but there is a special horror reserved for watching a bright young person, who should have all the reason to believe in his future, succumb to insidious cells proliferating in his body. Young adult cancer was both the reason I chose to walk at my first relay and the reason I deepened my involvement by helping to organize the relay at my undergraduate institution.

And so there was strange irony in the night I found myself in an emergency room this past fall. I had had unexplained high and persistent fevers, and my doctor recommended I go to the hospital. An initial scan of my abdomen revealed a nearly five-centimeter mass on my left kidney.

Subsequent biopsies and scans confirmed that the mass was renal cell carcinoma. I learned in the days that followed that RCC is particularly resilient in that typically does not respond to chemotherapy or radiation. My primary treatment option was surgery. The implication was that if the disease metastasized beyond my kidney, my chance of a cure would plummet. It was with this disturbing knowledge in mind that I had a radical nephrectomy, removing my entire left kidney along with 32 lymph nodes.

One of the cruelties of young adult cancer is that it is perfectly choreographed to knock the victim down during what should be the prime of his or her life. I was due to start my third year of graduate school the week of my diagnosis, a year that would have seen the start of my career as a teaching fellow, and would have allowed me to continue to pursue a burgeoning line of research. With my diagnosis I was initiated into the strange club of young adult cancer patients and survivors, whose sobering stories had motivated me to relay for so many years.

I now spoke their language. We understood the myriad everyday horrors that accompany the gauntlet that is the cancer experience. More so than the diagnosis itself, for example, I remember lying in my hospital bed, dreading having to deliver to my mom and dad what is among the most devastating news a parent could receive.

There was also the everyday horror of waiting. Cancer patients understand that so much of the disease involves idleness—waiting for the next appointment or scan or treatment or test. This is followed by the horror of waiting for the results of these tests, which often indicate whether those insidious cells will come to tyrannize your body. I witnessed the horror of watching my parents lose their parental innocence—their belief that, with enough love, they could always guarantee their child’s well being.

I was lucky. The pathology report following my operation indicated that the cancer was contained in my kidney. I recovered from my operation remarkably well. Thinking about my experience retrospectively, it is clear there were silver linings. T.S. Elliot has a line: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

One of the great silver linings of cancer is that it has reminded me to never “miss the meaning”—to relish in the ordinary. During my treatment, I witnessed the very best of the human spirit in the kindness of my doctors and nurses, my family, friends and colleagues, and administrators at the university. My family has always been close, but we now share a palpable sense that we are “each other’s keepers.” Cancer has affirmed for me that loving people well is the best legacy I can leave. But these silver linings should never legitimize the suffering and the everyday horrors of the disease.

My own experiences will motivate me as I relay this year—my first year as a cancer survivor. Please join me and other cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and allies as we fight back against a disease that has already taken too much.

Sarah C. Cotterill is a third year graduate student in the Department of Psychology and a member of Harvard Relay for Life.  This year's Relay for Life will be held on April 5 at the Gordon Track. For more details, please visit http://www.relayforlife.org/harvarduniversity.