Colon Cancer at 34

 For Christmas this year I ordered a light for the closet and 100 matching hangers.  I was finally going to make my space look organized and turn it into an adult space.   This school year I started loving my school "uniform"... dress with shorts or leggings on and comfortable shoes.  Unless it was a day we could dress down and all those tshirts (SpEd dept, Math dept, general teacher, union, and district colors) were in one row of my dresser drawer to easily grab.  Choosing these outfits meant I could easily sleep in until 20 minutes before I left to get to school... arriving ~15 minutes before school started.   Over Christmas break I had started changing out dresses onto the new hangers, then I ended up in the ER after the first day back to school from break.  So the project sat waiting until I had enough energy and could bend to do it.  Two weeks later, right before surgery, I was able to finish that project.  I had desired to go ...

When I started my health journey January 3rd this year one of the things I wondered was the financial costs I would encounter.  I had been working on my finances and organization really intentionally since 2020 and wanted guidance on this next phase of life.  However, I couldn't find much support for how to spend my medical leave of absence as a productive person or what costs to expect as I ultimately was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at 34.  So I'm going to blog my perspective as a Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) with cancer so others can hopefully learn from it.  While I knew I had health insurance from my job as a high school special education teacher, I wasn't sure what it included beyond doctor appointments.  I had never needed to go to the ER or hospital for myself (just for my foster teens who had their own insurance).  As I rode in the ambulance early in the morning on the 4th to a higher quality hospital, I wondered how much the ride would ...