PERSONAL STORIES
The Distance Between Who I Was and Who I Wanted to Be
Part Two: A journey of connection, identity, and what it means to keep becoming after cancer.
Written by: Mike Tirone, Ulman Foundation Board Member
It’s commonly said, ‘an individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.’ And when you grow up in the rural mountains of New Hampshire, it’s easy for everyone in town to know about your diagnosis and a community that feels like a galvanized family. Therefore, once I made my grueling way through two bouts of Hodgkin’s disease lymphoma, chemotherapy, radiation, a stem cell transplant and several months of living in isolation as a ‘bubble boy’ all before my 16th birthday, I knew when the opportunity to write a new chapter to my life became available, I would distance myself from “Mike Tirone, cancer boy.”
Four years after being the obvious cancer kid, a high school freshman nicknamed “two-toned Tirone” for my vicious radiation-burned jawline and neck, I stepped onto Loyola College campus a freshman ready to reinvent himself, and a survivor label I wanted no one to know about. I knew no one, which meant they didn’t know about me and my disease, and I liked it that way. Hundreds of miles from the ashes of my cancer battle, but a lifetime away from the reputation of cancer patient.
I made great relationships and started thriving in this new lease on life. But no one knew the secret I was holding. Teammates on my soccer team asked about the scars on my neck, chest and stomach in the locker room, people asked why I wore the obvious yellow Livestrong band on my wrist, close friends wondered how someone with such poor SAT scores could get into a prestigious school. I dodged, deflected, and lied.
I was caught between identities; one was a young man with a completely different perspective of this second lease on life I received, and another was this scared boy who never truly processed the severity of his early teens and now was in a foreign land away from the family who sacrificed everything to save his life.
Early into my college experience, I felt a major crisis in who I was. I had been taking this new identity of mine for a test drive, and it felt great, but slightly dangerous. I had integrated well into college; I had a diverse group of friends, building bonds, getting involved in several on-campus groups and activities, and I had made the very competitive club soccer team. Then came initiation. After making the team, all the freshmen were to be given outrageous haircuts by the seniors, and they had to keep them for the week leading up to one of our biggest matches.
A senior captain, with clippers in his hands laughingly asked me, “you ever had a quad-hawk?” I replied, “I’ve probably had worse.” He confusingly asked what I meant, and I brushed it off as he started haphazardly carving up my head. A fellow freshman asked me if I was worried about what I’d look like and I glibly said, “it could be worse, at least we still have hair.” My apathy to the haircut probably left teammates feeling like I wasn’t telling them something – but my demeanor – in general – to not take life so seriously probably kept them from investigating further.
I was pleased with how well I was hiding my past to everyone. I was the fun-loving, optimistic, outgoing, freshman who played all the sports, wrote for the newspaper, talked about his family and friends back home often, and was making a lot of friends. But at times it felt somewhat like leading a double life. Not being authentic and honest felt wrong to me. Especially to those who I became very close to and trusted. They were the ones who I wanted to tell all about it so badly, to release that burden weighing on me so that even just one person could know ‘the real me’ and the reason I was who they had gotten to know. But I liked the persona I was building, and I didn’t want to jeopardize it. I was afraid it could tarnish the reputation I had built and this time, I could control the narrative.
The remnants of the “cancer boy” label was still living amongst the battlefields left from the several years of war that raged through my family in New Hampshire. But the “survivor” label was being intentionally concealed in this new life being built. I buried it so deep, I didn’t even realize it until too late.