I believe being able to properly educate young adults on cancer and cancer prevention is without a doubt an issue that needs to be addressed. Having been diagnosed with Osteosarcoma (Bone Cancer) at the age of 17, then again at 21, and having my left leg amputated because of it, was something that I was not prepared for. Being a young adult, never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be diagnosed with cancer. At that age I thought I was invincible, I went from being an athlete and thinking of where I was going to go to college, to being a bed-ridden amputee receiving chemo and praying that this cancer was not going to kill me. Until the time of my diagnosis, cancer was something I had heard about but really knew nothing about. One of the few things I knew was that a person would lose all their hair during treatment. I had no idea what cancer was all about and the magnitude of it.
As a young adult, my focus was on playing sports, going to school and having fun. Nowhere in my frame of mind did I ever think about cancer. That type of thinking is something I believe can be echoed by millions of young adults. This is an issue that needs to change. After having gone through and survived my encounters with cancer I now know that cancer affects millions of young adults and is something that needs to be discussed and action needs to be taken to help educate young adults as to cancer and cancer prevention. I had no idea of what to expect, or what I was in for. I had no clue what treatment options I had or even what questions to ask. All I could do was take the words of my doctors, and thankfully I had great ones. Even so, it was a terrifying experience made all the more difficult because I had to rely on what other people told me to do and I did not have the knowledge base from which to have more of a say in my own treatment.
Young adults need to be educated on cancer because the likelihood is that many will be faced with this disease or have friends or family face the disease. They need to know what cancer is and the long and short term effects it can have. By being better educated, they can have the knowledge and power to have more of an impact on their treatments and their cancer fighting road map. They can have better knowledge of what questions to ask and to get answers to their questions. Cancer is something that will be a part of a person for the rest of his or her life. A person can beat the disease but the emotional and physical scars can last a lifetime. In my case, I beat cancer but cancer took my leg, and this is something that will affect my everyday life for the rest of my life.