Single Player: Humor, Love, Breast Cancer and a Gaming Girl... by Jamie Nicole Page A

pretty terrible, especially to my young, impressionable ears. There were percentages and survival rates being discussed and it didn’t sound like the odds were in his favor.
    It’s important to keep in mind that I had no mother, so when my Aunt came to town it was a really (stress the really) REALLY, big deal! To hear Aunt Joanie crying both upset and scared me. Before, when the cancer “was just a problem he had,” I wasn’t worried. I didn’t know there was a possibility of a bad outcome in his scenario, because he hadn’t said! Now, Aunt Joanie was crying and all I ever wanted when she was around was her undivided, loving and contagiously happy attention. She’s the person who taught me how to braid my Barbie’s hair and how to paint my toe nails and finger nails after buying me an amazing child’s size manicure box full of colors and clippers. She’s also the reason I love to sew. Her mission in my life was simple, teach me how to be a girl and add some much-needed estrogen to the testosterone-abundant cloud that I was living within. Whenever she was around that’s how it was: she happily taught, I happily learned.
    So imagine how devastated I was when I came down the hall and heard my lovely, cheerful Aunt Joanie crying.  This was when I first began to understand that what was happening to my dad was not just a “problem we’d get through” like he’d explained to my brother and I one afternoon when he sat us down and told us about the cancer. And thus this was where my fear began to take root. It was the little mustard seed that could. This kernel would eventually spread its ugly roots deep into the core of my life and lead me to where I am today, trapped inside myself and the complex ecosystem known as my fear.   
    Now imagine you’re in the first week of fifth grade, terribly thin, a bit on the nerdy side and lacking an abundance of healthy female role models in your life.  Then picture this: you’re getting ready to climb into your big fluffy canopy bed, surrounded by walls covered with beautiful Victoria’s Secret models and you feel something warm run between your legs. Thankful for the en suite bathroom your father had the foresight to provide you, you quickly get to the bathroom only to find a dark, slimy trail of blood running from your pink and white polka-dotted cotton briefs. What do you do?
    I’ll tell you what I did. I shoved a bunch of toilet paper inside my hemorrhaging underwear, went to bed and cried for several long hours before mercy finally came along and gave me over to her friend sleep. The next morning was Saturday and I should have woken up and ran to the living room to watch cartoons as I always did.  Instead, I woke up with dried blood all over my sheets and crusted on my thighs and then, because things were already going so great, I had the joy of hearing my dad get sick for the first time. This was the day that I would learn what cancer really was… a cruel and brutal beast, a daddy killer. Dad’s first chemo appointment was the day before and it became apparent on this day that he was not going to breeze through it the way he’d intended.
    Instead it proved to be the monster that made my energetic father vomit all day and into the darkness of the night. It became the fiend that would steal his natural joy that had been so similar to my Aunt Joanie’s,  joy that ran through their sibling DNA like the threads that weave through an intricately woven tapestry of happiness.  It was absolutely not the time to tell my ailing father that I too had “the cancer” and was going to probably die with him.  It would devastate my Aunt Joanie, my brother and my best friend Ashton. They’d all been through enough already and now both my father and I were going to die from breast cancer. Our shared fate was unfathomable to my eleven-year-old mind.
    Then suddenly a week later the bleeding stopped and I thought maybe I was in remission, a new term recently added to my cancer