My name is Luke England and I am a 16-year-old sophomore at East Hall High School. I am your typical high school kid. I enjoy playing baseball and football and spending time with my friends. However, I am anything but typical. Last year, I fought and beat cancer.

My cancer story starts in early November 2017. I had just come back from a hunting trip when I had developed a fever. I had been to my pediatrician where they ran tests to understand what exactly was going on. After missing a lot of school due to constant pain and fevers and a few negative tests, I had now hit day 17 of my fever. 17 days of a fever -- this is when we knew something wasn’t quite right.

During the week of Thanksgiving that year, the doctors did tests only to find that there were masses all over the organs in my body. After biopsy-ing the masses, my team of doctors believe these masses were part of an infectious disease. The infectious disease teams continued to run tests to understand how to best relieve my pain and constant fevers.

Then… January rolled around. During the month of January, things started to progress. The pain increased significantly. I continued to play baseball, because I was a 15-year-old kid, and my life revolved around sports. While at baseball practice, the best option for me was to hit because I had some much adrenaline from making contact with the ball that it appeased the pain for a while. Then, one night at practice, I was hitting when I missed the ball and all the pain hit me at once. This is when I knew I just had to throw in the towel because the pain was too much. Walking off a baseball practice was pretty extreme from me, so this is when my friends, coaches, and parents knew they had to find answers.

Throughout the month of January, I also started taking baths to appease the pain. My house has two hot water heaters in the bathrooms, so I would fill one bathtub with hot water and sit in it until it got cold then I would move to the next bathtub. Because spending all my spare time jumping from bathtub to bathtub was the only way to fight this pain. I also had a very difficult time sleeping. Regardless of which way I slept, it was hurting my shoulder or my elbow, so I spent about 2 weeks without sleep. Just standing and walking around my room in the middle of the night because the pain was not worth the sleep.

In the beginning of February, I lost about 30% movement in my elbow and a mass popped up the size of a fist of my left shoulder blade. On Feb. 14 I hit a breaking point of no longer being able to handle the pain.

The next day my mom took me back to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta determined to stay until we found some answers. After more tests, the masses were now showing cancer cells. We spent the weekend at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center waiting to understand what type of cancer it was. We were told that there was a slim chance that the cancer could be lymphoma since it was ruled out back in November. My clinical team believed that the tests would more than likely come back to show a solid tumor mass – possibly a cancer like Ewing Sarcoma – which is rare and aggressive. Essentially, that weekend my parents were told to get ready to expect the worst. I, on the other hand, spent that weekend with the 200 visitors that had come to see me. Yes, that very first weekend, I had over 200 people who had driven the hour drive to come see me in the hospital.

That Tuesday, we received the news that the cancer that presented itself on my body was indeed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which seemed like a far more promising diagnosis than a rarer solid tumor. In fact, my parents had spent the weekend praying that it was a type of lymphoma.

I was then prescribed 6 months of chemotherapy where I was in the hospital for about 5 days every 21 days. While being at the hospital was not ideal, I developed relationships with the clinical team that truly started to feel like family. Some of my nurses would come in on their days off if they were going out of town to come see me before the left. Me and some of the nurses would have coffee dates regularly and a lot of them would come in to share the Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids that my many visitors were constantly bringing.

Treatment almost instantly made an impact. The fist-size mass on my shoulder went away almost immediately. I was also very lucky that chemo never made me sick or nauseas and I never experienced any setbacks, like spiking a fever. In fact, 31 days after my first round of chemo, I played in my first high school baseball game and attended prom. I can confidently say that after starting treatment, things were officially looking up.

The six months of chemo led to me ringing the end of treatment bell in July. The ringing of the bell was a milestone in my cancer story as that is when I was officially deemed done with treatment and no signs of cancer left in my body.

I have continued my life as a typical high schooler. I am now in my sophomore year and have a pretty busy schedule with football, baseball, and spending time with friends and family. The biggest impact that my journey with cancer has left on me is maturity. I understand how valuable life really is. There can be a lot of drama in high school which can be hard for me since I understand there is so much more to life. All this to say, I am doing great now. I have my driver’s license and endless opportunities in front of me.