Whenever you attend a new school students always have to get a physical. The school needs to have your information that you’re healthy. So entering middle school I had to get a physical. It was a new year and a new school. I was excited finally feeling like I was growing up wouldn’t be treated like a baby anymore. So one day in the summer, my mother schedules an appointment at the doctors because I needed a new physical before entering the new school year. I show up at the doctor’s office, I file out the paper work information and a few questions. After minutes sitting there in the waiting room, the nurse calls me in. She says “Ernesto, how are you feeling today?” And I reply with “I feel perfectly fine.” I get my height and weight measured. Then after all that I get my blood pressure measured. After the basic procedures are done, the nurse says that the doctor would return shortly. Waiting for the doctor to enter is a lifetime! Feels like you wait there in silent forever.

When the doctor finally enters the room: he checks my heart, throat, etc. He always asks you how you feeling and everyone always respond with “I’m good.” For a strange reason the doctors tells my mother “I want to run some blood work on your son to see how he’s doing; its optional so I would need your permission to execute so” my mother trying to look out for my best interest says “it’s fine. You have my permission.” I hate needles. I felt like my mom wanted to punish me because I was always misbehaving. A couple minutes later the nurse comes in, and draws some blood from my arm. Hate that feeling. Then leaves the room and goes off to her precede her job. Minutes later the doctor comes in and tells us that my blood looked a little low. That he wanted me to go to the hospital to execute a few more test. We believed that the reason for that was that I wasn’t eating right; I was never hungry.

The next day I go to the hospital with my parents; I get admitted for three days. I felt like a king. I got all the food I wanted, got to play all the videogames I desired, and watch all the television I wanted to watch. All I had to put up was with a few doctors coming in every so often to run a few tests on me. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t really care either. I was a kid; ten/eleven year-old don’t think about that. That third day at night the doctors tell my family and I to go home for the weekend and return the following Monday. I go home that night; and my whole family is there. Didn’t know why they were there. They were probably worried because I was gone. Didn’t think of it much; I love having visitors at home. That night my cousins and I played videogames all night.
Monday comes along and I returned to the hospital early that morning. I get admitted and get a hospital room to myself. But something was off; I was getting a bad vibe that day. Watch television for a few hours until the doctors come in my room. They sit next to my parents and me, and reveal the news. They tell me, “Ernesto, with the entire test we ran on, we discovered you have leukemia; cancer in the blood.” Hearing those words “you have cancer” was the worst moment of my life. I felt as if I was going to die. I didn’t know why it was happening to me. No one knew the reason that caused me the cancer. All I knew was that I was going to get treatment.

Months passed, six months to be exact; going through chemotherapy, losing my hair, and a ton of weight. It was if I was living in hell. I eventually beat cancer. The last day in the hospital one of the doctors had told me that if we hadn’t found it the time we did, I probably wouldn’t have made it alive. I soon realized that if it wasn’t for the curious doctor, checking my blood, that summer getting my physical I would’ve been dead. That’s the day the doctor saved my life.