I couldn’t stand up. There was a bizarre feeling going through my legs at the time, no pain, just an overwhelming sense of weakness whenever I tried to stand. I realized right then that something was very, very, wrong. That something turned out to be Stage 3 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. That was the day I found out that I had cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back, that was undoubtedly one of the most crucial moments of my life. I was only four years old at the time, so I wasn’t old enough yet to fully grasp my chances of survival and how grim the situation was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the whole experience really forced me to grow up a little quicker, and it’s still affecting me to this day. I was exposed to a lot of things that most four-year-old kids aren’t. Although I didn’t understand a lot of the things going on around me at the time, they still imprinted on me and changed the way I acted and thought in ways that even now I cant’ fully comprehend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were simple things like how I spent a lot of my time in the game room doing puzzles and word searches, which eventually led to my love for problem-solving. Even without actively understanding everything, I subconsciously picked up on a lot of things just from spending so much time interacting with adults instead of kids my age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the most significant lessons I learned was because of the boy in the room next to me. He was a little older than me, but I found out that we had not only the same type of cancer, but also the same Spider-man bed sheets. Of course, this meant that I immediately like him. Despite only getting to interact with him once or twice, I pretty much considered him as the only friend I had there, and I think he thought the same about me. One day he’s there, and everything seemed fine, and then I wake up the next morning, and he’s gone, and they’re clearing out his room, and I just couldn’t understand why. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back, that was probably the first time someone I knew had died, and even though I didn’t explicitly know he was dead, I knew that I’d never see him again, and that made me feel sad. I think that was where I first learned about mortality, I didn’t know how to put it in words, but I started to understand that sometimes people leave and they just don’t come back. It also taught me to always try and make the most of the time I had with the people around me because I was afraid that if they left, they might not come back too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took a year of chemotherapy for me to be cleared and taken off the treatment. The people I met and the things I experienced during that year truly shaped me in to the person I am today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m known for many things; Tyler the gamer, the smart guy, they guy who’s not always so smart, the guy who likes making jokes, the kind of weird guy, the loud guy, the guy who can drink 2-liter bottles of fruit punch at an alarming rate, but at my core, I am Tyler the cancer survivor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
~~TYLER JONES<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I couldn’t stand up. There was a bizarre feeling going through my legs at the time, no pain, just an overwhelming sense of weakness whenever I tried to stand. I realized right then that something was very, very, wrong. That something turned out to be Stage 3 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. That was the day I found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faithhopeandlovejesus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}