Meet a Young Adult With Stage IV Sarcoma

Hi there! My name is Mitch. I was diagnosed with terminal stage IV sarcoma when I was 20. Now I’m 24 and living off treatment, hopefully for a while! I’m even starting to grow my eyebrows back! Pretty stoked to have a mustache for summertime too.

Now, if you’re a frequent flier to my blog, you’re probably thinking, “no shit Mitch, I’ve been reading your nonsense for months now. I know you have cancer.” Well I say this for 2 reasons: 1) if you’re thinking that then you’re probably one of my friends or family so buzz off, this particular blog isn’t for you anyways and 2) it’s scary getting cancer. It can be even scarier when you get a rare type of cancer at a young age and you look around at all the healthy young adults around you and realize that you’re all alone. Sure, friends and family are there to support you, but they don’t have what you have and they can’t provide you with the type of advice and perspective you may need as a young cancer-haver.

When I got diagnosed with my stage IV sarcoma, I went over a year and a half before I ever met/heard of someone else with sarcoma. It was a delight meeting someone with the same thing I had! But then he died the next week so it turned out to be rather short-lived. But I had met someone! I wasn’t the only person in the world with sarcoma anymore! If I was a young lady with breast cancer, I would have about 1,000 new cancer gal pals with the same thing as me after spending 10 minutes on Twitter. If you ask me, people with breast cancer do it right. It seems like every last one of em is writing about it. But what about us folks with rarer cancers? Or those of us who got diagnosed before we turned the ripe old age of 35? It’s a lot harder to find someone who understands your situation when you have something less common. People with breast cancer are always saying they’re having lumpectomies or people with leukemia have blast percentages. What the hell is that shit? I don’t deal with any of that. I want to talk to someone with some good ol American made soft-tissue cancer and we can talk about Etopiside and Taxotere until the cows come home.

I’m writing this blog as a way of getting up on my lil cancer soapbox and announcing to the interwebs, “I’m a young adult with stage IV sarcoma!” Because if I don’t do this, then some poor kid out there may be getting the worst news of their life and feeling like they have no one to relate to. I think it’s important that people my age getting stage IV sarcoma can hit the web, google “has anyone survived terminal sarcoma past their expected death date” and then get my blog all up in their face with me going “I outlived my date by 3 years and counting biiiiiittttccchhhhh.” Terminal cancer isn’t necessarily an immediate death sentence. You can survive for a pretty damn long time past the date your doctor expects you to kick the bucket. Just look at me.