I was 25 years old when I was diagnosed with cancer. It was at a time when I was doing what I did best – dancing and I was taking a course to become a future color and style advisor. I had been working on it for almost two years, I grew to the level that I could easily record the dance steps and I built up the necessary condition. In fact I lived and breathed dance and style but nearing the summer of 2007, I was getting really fatigued and wasn’t able to attend all classes of the Color and style course. I had to be absent on the final testing. I didn’t know what was going wrong with me.
During the beginning of that year I had been several times to the general practitioner for symptoms like severe fatigue. He took blood samples but the blood results gave no complications. I struggled through and I went to Morocco for 2 weeks with my parents to clear my head after being fired due to the fact that I called in sick many times. On vacation I began having horrible coughs. My uncle pointed out to me that I had a cough like a smoker and he heard me coughing when I was sleeping, and advised me urgently to go to the doctor. One day I needed to go on my own from Casablanca to Marrakech to see some interesting sights. In the train I suddenly began crying, without reason. The only thing I felt was that I was in a state of being totally lost. Once in Marrakech I was overtired, I thought it was because of the heat. Speaking to my friends through internet and having need of them in this difficult time, I decided to go back home earlier to join them on a famous festival in Belgium. One night during that festival I woke up coughing so hard that I had to vomit out of my tent. Again I thought of other things such as bronchitis because of the humidity in our tent. A best friend Tessa was so worried and said very loudly: ‘’You must go urgently to your general practitioner!”.
After the festival I went right away to my general