A few weeks before I turned nineteen, I was sitting next to my mom. When I looked at her, she noticed something strange—my left eye wasn’t moving with my right eye. It looked like I had a lazy eye.
The next day, after we had laughed about how silly it looked, my mom decided to schedule an appointment with a neuro-ophthalmologist. We went in on a busy Saturday, and after checking my eye, the doctor told us to come back another day when he would have more time to run tests.
About two weeks later, my mom and I went to his other office. He checked my eye again and asked if I had been seeing double. That’s when I realized I had. He explained that my condition, called sixth cranial nerve palsy, could be caused by an infection or, in rare cases, a brain tumor. To find out, he ordered a chest X-ray, blood work, and a head MRI.
The blood work and X-ray didn’t show anything unusual. My mom was hopeful as we went in for the MRI, but deep down, I felt like this was going to be something serious. After the scan, we went out for lunch, feeling happy and trying not to worry. When we got home, I started working on my online classes (thanks to 2020). A few hours later, my mom rushed into my room, looking panicked, and told me to pick up the phone.
It was my doctor. He told me they found a mass in my brain pressing against my sixth cranial nerve. He thought it was a rare type of bone cancer called chordoma, which had grown at the base of my skull. Two days after my nineteenth birthday, I was officially diagnosed.
Since then, the doctors confirmed my diagnosis, and I had surgery to remove the tumor. There were a lot of complications—brain fluid leaks, infections—but I made it through. About 5–10% of the tumor was still there, so I had proton radiation therapy to destroy the rest. In a few weeks…
