Prologue
My name is Anna Hudson. I live in a central California town with a one-eyed professional gardener obsessed with tulips. I have Recnacdo Ol' Berara, an extremely rare and deadly blood cancer. If the professional men in the hospital are correct, my life shall end in four years.
I groaned at this ridiculous beginning of this essay I wrote three years ago, when I was still in school. Seriously? Introduce yourself? Pointless. I know it was the beginning of the school year and I was supposed to let the class know who Anna Hudson was, but 'knowing someone' is a result of spending time with one another, not a shitty essay with red crosses on grammatical mistakes and misspelled words (and the annoying fact that Mrs Charlesworth disapproves of my precise description of my mother in a nutshell).
I do miss school though. No, never would I miss the studying and getting stuck in the classroom for 10 hours, but my friends. I miss Claire. I miss Jake. And all my classmates. Occasionally, teachers, too, but some of them are rather mean UNTIL they find out that you are dying.
This, my friend, is the plus side of getting cancer. The perks you get, the things you get to do and run away with, the life different from others, the unique point of view you have… All these are side effects of cancer. The good side effects, to be more precise. The bad side, though, is certainly peculiarity and death. You can never be normal again. This is not a 'there and back again' adventure. This is a one-way road. And you can see the end nearing you every moment. The end of the road. A curious entrance to the place people call 'Heaven'.
In spite of all these, I tend to keep myself optimistic. All lives end one day, and the only, slight difference is the mere distance of the road. The more important thing is to make this road worthy of walking. The main point of life is not that you have left, but that you have been here and did something so that people shall forever remember your existence and greatness that dwell within.
That is why I decided to set up the Anna Foundation for People with Cancer who Want to Cure Cholera.