20 Years Looking Back As A Cancer Survivor In NYC
A pre-diagnosis photograph of my family.
The Diagnosis
I was diagnosed around 2005. This is the first time in the 20 years since having had cancer that I’ve ever written about my experience with cancer. At the time I never could’ve imagined surviving another 20 years and each year has been a blessing since I got the news I was in remission. From the shock of my last doctors appointment telling me I had completed treatment to the last long term care follow up I had this year in 2025, it really got me thinking about life, death, and how quickly time moves.
I was just about to celebrate my 10th birthday when I was diagnosed with cancer. I had come home fresh from sleep-away camp when I started feeling ill. I was a really rambunctious, happy-go-lucky kid at the time and hadn’t the clue about the consequences or ripple effects of what was about to unfold. After days of moving from hospital to hospital, and doctors office to doctors office, we finally made it to the right place and our minds went to the darkest places. Brain cancer? Terminal illness? Untreatable? Incurable? Even when you do finish treatment, they never actually ever do tell you, you are cured, merely that you are in remission, a state where the disease is no longer active or spreading because there is always a chance it can come back.
Cancer is prohibitively expensive—often in ways you can’t fully grasp until you're living through it. I had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), which is considered very treatable, but the cost of staying alive was staggering. At one point, I had sort of made peace with the idea of dying. But I was lucky. I was extremely fortunate to have been born into a family that could afford to pay for the best treatment possible. I had incredibly supportive family and friends, and my grandparents on both sides stepped in to help cover the treatment costs. Without them, I honestly don't know how I would’ve made it.
Source: Squarespace/ Unsplash
My Time Going Through Treatment
I was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which I still consider the best cancer hospital in the world. It wasn’t cheap, but the doctors there were some of the best I’ve ever encountered. They gave me their full attention and care—nothing felt rushed or impersonal. I genuinely believe that their level of treatment helped save my life. The doctor in charge of my treatment was Dr. Stephen Steinherz. During his nearly fifty years at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Stephen Steinherz helped shape the way childhood leukemia is treated around the world.
He was instrumental in developing the New York I and New York II protocols—innovative treatment plans that have become the global standard of care for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer. Thanks to his work, survival rates for children with ALL have risen dramatically, from just 50% in the 1970s to over 90% for standard-risk patients today. I was fortunate enough to be one of Dr. Steinherz’s patients. His calm confidence, clinical brilliance, and unwavering compassion made an overwhelming experience feel manageable. He didn’t just treat my illness—he treated me like a person, and I’ll never forget the trust and reassurance he gave my family during one of the hardest chapters of our lives.
Going through chemotherapy felt like being in a war zone. Not everyone makes it out. Some people you meet along the way just don’t survive—and there's nothing you can do. You grieve, quietly, and then you keep moving forward with their memory tucked away inside you.
There was one patient, a young boy with a large family that was always coming in and going out of his room, that I remember vividly. To this day, we never saw what he looked like but we heard him. He had the most blood curdling screams. At the time, it was so excessive it was almost humorous. My mom and I would roll our eyes, we would complain to each other and even laugh about the situation as it occurred day after day for weeks whenever I was receiving inpatient treatment. And then one day they stopped. We thought maybe he got transferred to another hospital or finished treatment but he had passed away. My stomach sank when I heard the news. The next day, the curtain to the hospital section that had remained closed for as long as we could remember was pulled wide open, empty, and the bed was made as if nothing had happened. That was the last time I ever passed judgment for how someone responded to treatment.
I lost a lot of time at such a young age, when most kids were out playing sports or going to the movies I was stuck at home. When most kids were socializing or gossiping about popularity I was completely alone. It wasn’t the end of the world though, I had computer games, plenty of movies, and plenty of things to keep me entertained but it was hard staying inside an apartment in NYC watching the world go by. It almost felt like being in prison. On top of that, even when I was able to leave the apartment, because of the amount of medicine I was taking, I was always somehow hooked up to some kind of IV and had to take fanny packs filled with chemotherapy with me when I left home. I had more drugs pumped into my system than most people do in an entire lifetime.
Source: Squarespace/ Unsplash
Your Mental And Emotional Environment
Surviving cancer isn’t where the struggle ends. When I was well enough near the end of treatment to return to school, I was bullied. I had thinning hair, pale skin, and I didn’t look well. People pitied me, or worse, looked down on me. It was hard to hold onto close friendships during those years. I wore a beanie most days and even bought a wig, though I never ended up wearing it.
Since the 20 years since I’ve had cancer, I’ve lost people people I’ve met over the years in my life and people I love to cancer. Having gone through it myself, I’ve tried to help guide them through their own treatments, but I’ve learned the hard way that you can only do so much. I’ve tried to influence where someone might have been treated based on my own experience but some things are just out of your hands. People have different priorities, people have different feelings and different ways of handling things.
After cancer, I became more of a risk taker. Facing death changes how you see everything. Time feels shorter. Life feels more immediate. You stop waiting around. You make decisions faster, love harder, and stop pretending that anything is guaranteed. Especially in this day and age where the company you work for or the government of your country actively makes your life harder, its hard to listen to advice that promotes the status quo with what I’ve seen. People being denied treatment and dying because their insurance won’t cover their medicine. Doctors refusing to perform certain research because funding was slashed, or provide certain medicine or cancer drugs purely because a foreign country our government doesn’t like manufactures it.
I’ve realized that a lot of healing—and surviving—has to do with your mental and emotional environment. Your diet is not just about what you eat; it’s also what you read, what you watch, who you surround yourself with. You have to stay around light, or the darkness creeps in. Social media and politics can be so toxic, and if you’re not careful, they’ll start to wear you down. For many people, just getting out of bed in the morning is hard enough while healthy. When you’re battling cancer, your mindset is everything. You have to believe in a future worth living for—and want to see yourself in it.
My father and I with Bruce Springsteen at a fundraising event.
The Silver Linings
As a cancer patient, you get to meet a lot of people. People pursuing self promotional photo-ops with sick kids, or celebrities that genuinely care about kids and want to make them feel better. As a cancer patient you don’t really know who everyone is, especially as a child cancer patient, a lot of celebrities are just thrown at you. And as a 10 year old, half the celebrities I was introduced too I just hadn’t been alive long enough yet to have been introduced to their work.
There were so many fundraisers for cancer awareness, dinners, and luncheons, where they’d bring celebrities and cancer patients in a room to raise money. It sometimes felt superficial but in the end the purpose was to raise money for cancer research so the money usually wound up going to a good cause.
I met news anchors to TV channels I didn’t watch, sports players to teams I didn’t root for, musicians whose music I’d never heard of, and film celebrities whose movies I’d never seen. Every time felt different, even if I didn’t know who they were there was always still an aura around the experience. A vibe that extended beyond yourself.
I have signed baseballs from retired Yankees players, signed film posters and other paraphernalia but I’d give it all away to have not had cancer. Although I guess I should say I appreciated the experience and learned and grew from it or that I wouldn’t trade it for anything because it made me who I am today but I wouldn’t wish cancer on my worst enemies. It corrupts you from within, it doesn’t just kill you bit by bit, it kills your soul bit by bit too. The levels of depression I experienced were bottomless at the time. The only other real world experience I can draw on to compare it to is like being stuck going into the office 5 days a week for a boring 9-5 you absolutely loathe. As is with most things in life, depression usually stems from being forced to live in an environment you wouldn’t choose to be in that is out of your control.
Me and Harrison Ford at one of the Met’s Restaurants grabbing lunch.
Make a wish
When I was three years old my father stole the remote from my mom and changed the channel from Little Bear to Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. That started my lifelong fascination with Indiana Jones, archaeology, and traveling to exotic countries after finishing treatment.
I went through all of the films and the TV series, and I’d watch and re-watch them. Most kids my age had no idea what Indiana Jones was but I was obsessed.
As a cancer patient my family was approached by Make A Wish. It’s a common misconception that they only provide wishes to terminal patients. They were interested in granting me a wish and were even willing to wait until after I finished treatment to grant it. I didn’t hesitate to make my wish. I wanted to meet Harrison ford or “Indiana Jones.” And to add the cherry on top, we were going to tour the Egyptian exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art and also view never before seen artifacts that were actually in the process of being either cataloged or restored. It took a long time for Make A Wish to sort it out, months even but we got the call around my 13th birthday.
It was 2008 and they had just released Indiana Jones IV and were ready to fulfill the wish. At the time, the movie wasn’t getting good reviews and was getting dragged under the mud on social media. The film has aged much better now that there is a fifth one out. I didn’t think it was terrible myself at the time but I was very aware and mindful of the mixed reviews. I didn’t care one way or the other, I was still about to meet Harrison Ford.
The signed poster from Harrison Ford.
They had ordered a limo service to chauffeur us to the museum to meet Mr. Ford there. When the Limo arrived, my parents made sure I was the first to enter and to my surprise he was seated in the car with a bundle of different Indiana Jones related gifts and paraphernalia. My jaw dropped and I was speechless.
We chatted a little and he spoke about how he personally flew in from his Wyoming home into one of the NYC tri-state airports on his own private Cessna. We finally made it to the museum and worked our way through the crowds to the Egypt exhibit. To his surprise, people visibly recognized him. I think he thought at his age he was old news so I think it was also reassuring for him to know that people still vividly loved him. One mom with her kid even quietly whispered to him, “look it’s Han Solo” and he laughed. While I’d seen the Star Wars movies with Harrison Ford, I hadn’t been as captivated by them as I had with the Indiana Jones Franchise. Something about the concept of a professor in a boring lecture being able to abscond on a transcontinental expedition really struck home for me and allowed me to promote the escapism in my life when I was at such a low point.
We made our way to the Temple Of Dendur and the tour guide who was assigned to us and who was in on the wish pointed out how over the years many archaeologists and tourists had carved their initials or brands onto the temple. Mr. Ford jokingly pulled out his keys and flashed them to me saying, “Hey Jackson, why don’t you carve your initials in there.” We laughed and the tour guide choked and out of caution responded with something like, “please don’t.”
After our tour we got lunch at the Met’s dining room and I had a printout of maybe 20 questions to ask him that I ran through. It was such a surreal experience that we hardly made it through half the questions on the list. A couple of weeks later I got a signed copy of Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull in the mail that is still hanging in my childhood bedroom.
Mr. Ford has always been, not only a great actor, but also one who uses his platform to make a real difference and shed light on important cultural issues, and for that I highly respect him and salute him for his hard work over the years.
Looking Back
Getting through difficult situations depends on your environment as much as it depends on your own personal ability to work through it. The people you surround yourself with, the food you eat, the things you watch. Your environment is as much of a problem or solution as the underlying health issues most people face. Whether it is cancer, or another serious ailment, it is always important to contextualize what you are going through and what you want in your future.
The hospital hallways, the sting of chemo, the surreal opportunities I had to brush shoulders with celebrities all shaped what survival looked like in New York City for a kid going through cancer. It wasn’t just about beating cancer; it was about doing it in a city that keeps moving with or without you.
