There's nothing clearer than the moment you're diagnosed, it's fuzzy and confusing to say the least but it's a sort of clear fuzzy confusion; one you're likely to remember for the rest of your life. I remember my father sitting in shock at the doctor's office, and my mother; pleading with the doctor that there must be some sort of mistake, the results that came from several tests all had to be wrong somehow, that her baby girl was too young for any of this. I didn't cry, not a single tear shed from either eye. I didn't cry because I didn't feel a thing, just an overbearing numb sensation.
My name is Quinn, Quinn Fabray; and I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia when I turned thirteen. I was told I wouldn't have much over a year left, I'm seventeen now and still standing strong… or at least as strong as I can be. I left school a year after, as soon as everybody found out that I was sick they started to treat me differently. I could handle the work the same as I ever could, but I couldn't handle the pressure that was given to you when you had Cancer. As far as I was concerned nothing had changed. I was still me, I was still Quinn; but not many people had the same views as me.
My best friend Santana meant the world to me, she treated me the same way she always had. She was a total wildcard, outrageous and outgoing and everything that you could ever want in a best friend. She pushed me to all of my limits and stuck by me through the more difficult of times. She never made any attempt to talk in depressing ways about my cancer, if anything we always made sarcastic jokes about it, but I could tell she was hurting. I was and had always been her only friend, the only person she could turn to and the one thing that she was always going to lose. I could tell that she was hurting, I could always tell what she was thinking. After all, she was my best friend.
See that's the thing about me, I'm not always the kindest of people. And sometimes I would rather stick pins into my eyes than be in a social situation; but Santana was special to me, and the idea of leaving her alone in this harsh and crazy world was my idea of hell. I would much rather Santana be happy than anybody else.
Santana was the person who inspired me to make a list, a list of things that I wanted to accomplish before I died. The list was written upon my bedroom wall, hidden behind a big canvas that I placed there to stop my family from seeing the embarrassing things I wrote upon it. Every day we would try and accomplish something new.
I lived at home with my small but very individual family. My dad who quickly became a cancer obsessive; he would come to every doctor's appointment, spend hours a day on the internet trying to find unknown cures and medicines, check on me every twenty minutes just in case god forbid anything worse could happen to me, I guess there's two sides to every scale; My mom didn't care that much anymore, or at least I didn't think she did. She quickly turned to alcohol after I was diagnosed, she's been sober for a while but I don't think her brain functioned the way it once did, she missed every doctor's appointment, wouldn't speak about it at home and spent more time locked in her bedroom than out of it; whenever something went wrong she would make my dad fix the problem. Then there was the kid who just got caught up in all the drama, my little brother Daniel meant the world to me, he was 11 and obsessed with magic. He didn't understand cancer, he knew I was dying and he knew it was because I was ill but he hadn't come to terms with it, not really anyway. He was the idiot caught in the middle that just wanted somebody to watch his magic tricks; I was the only one to care.
I could tell you that this is a story of an inspiring teenage girl who was given an ultimatum and beat the odds. But I think we all know this isn't that type of story. This is the story of how my life became perfect, the story of how it only takes somebody to tell you you're dying, to really start living.
My name is Quinn Fabray, and my life was a series of moments.