Following is Austen's story, written by Austen.

I’ve spent my life playing soccer. I always figured if I died an untimely death it would be because of my rather extensive collection of concussions.

Soccer takes a toll on your body. If only you saw beneath my jersey, you’d know what I’m talking about. I’ve got horrific scars on both arms and discolored marks up and down my legs. I’ve learned how to take out my own stitches and can stay in an ice bath for 35 minutes before my lips turn blue. But Cancer was nothing like anything I had ever experienced and I’ve got the scars to prove it. My forearms are littered with track marks from countless IVs and blood tests. There’s a puckered wound in my lower back where they’ve drilled in my hip to get bone marrow samples, but the real prize is an 8 inch scar that runs down my stomach from my chest bone to my pelvis that’s a leftover from an exploratory surgery in which they removed a football-sized tumor from my abdomen.

Cancer has brought me to my knees. It has made me feel worse than I could ever imagine and has allowed me to see more beauty, truth, and triumph in a single day than many people experience in a lifetime. The question with chemo is what will the chemo kill first: the Cancer, or me? My exciting life has quickly become a nauseating routine of IV drips and doctors appointments. The sickness has been in the details, in the gruesome effects of the treatment. Cancer is a blurred sense of illness but chemo is an endless sequence of horrors until you begin to think that the cure is as bad or worse than the disease.

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