Call it luck. Call it good fortune. Call it whatever you want, but don't call it just another miracle. This is not just another miracle. This is THE miracle. It is MY miracle.

Late in December 2005 I went into the doctor for a cough I had since the Thanksgiving before. I had lost about 10 pounds, and was looking good. I attributed the weight loss to the extra efforts in the gym. Weighing in at 175 pounds at six feet tall, I felt pretty good about myself. Except for the mysterious cough.

Preliminary test showed that I might have had a case of "walking pneumonia" which I took antibiotics for for the next 2 weeks. I felt better overall, but I still had a cough that was getting worse. I was working out three or four times a week, and starting to feel more and more out of shape as the weeks progressed, so I went back to the doctor for a second round of antibiotics.

That's when I started having a pain in my chest. I researched on the internet for a possible reason, and I concluded I had strained or cracked a rib with what was now a violent cough. I went in for another x-ray to see what the problem was, and my doctor did not like what he saw.

I had a very large cloudy area covering my entire left lung. He sent me in for a closer look via CAT scan and that's when they found it. A 22cm tumor about one and a half centimeters in diameter. It was growing between the lobes of my left lung, closing it shut at it grew larger. It had also been wrapped around my major arteries. The restricted blood flow and decreased lung capacity was why I was getting tired all the time and losing sleep.

I went in the first week of January for a biopsy to see what this mass was. I waited a week and a half, and no results. Days seemed to crawl by as I eagerly waited by the phone, but nothing happened. Finally, my doctor calls me and asks me to come into the office.

We sat down and he plainly told me that the sample they took was not being identified by any of the test they were running on it. The tumor is growing so aggressively now, that if we don't start treatment very soon, then there won't be any stopping it. My heart sank into despair at those words, and I couldn't understand how this could happen to an athletic, healthy 24 year old. How on earth can this happen to me of all people?

My wife an I frantically called everyone we could call to get as many opinions on the sample as possible. We sent it all over the country, and finally the doctors at Emory University discovered I had a large B Cell Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma tumor. Very rare for someone my age, they told me. That afternoon I started the LONG journey of chemotherapy. I endured eight months of treatment, getting IV injections through a chemo port every three weeks. The treatments got harder and harder as my blood counts weakened. My white cell count dropped and stayed below 200 for weeks, and I got infection after infection because of it. I was becoming very anemic and even my hemoglobin was way down. Instead of postponing treatment, my doctor urged me to continue as to not let the tumor have a chance to rebound.

I hated the thought of food. I couldn't eat or sleep for what seemed like days at a time. I was exhausted yet wired from the large does of steroids I was getting. I counted down the days until I was finished, and they never went by fast enough.

Luckily, I had stage 3 Lymphoma, which had miraculously not metastasized yet. The tumor shrank over the course of the eight months after the chemo curso de milagros radiation therapy. I started gaining my weight back, and I started to enjoy eating again. Things were turning around finally.

There are few things that can motivate someone to endure the worst, to endure something that destroys your body in an effort to repair it. Life seems to do the same thing to us. Trouble, stress, illness, and hard times all wear us down. The important thing is to not give in to them and stand your ground. Stand Firm. Stand on whatever you have. For some, it may be friends, or family or hope or whatever. For me it was faith. I knew that whatever the outcome, it was right. What made sense to me was not what was important. I trusted that my faith would heal me, or get me through to heaven on the other side. Therefore, I gave up being the victim. I gave up focusing on the negative in life. I realized that a vision and a dream carry you further than doubts and reasons.

You get one chance at life. You only get one opportunity to make it great. Take the promise and claim it as your own; have life and have it to the full. My dream has always been to work with cars, and to build a career out of my hobby. In 2007 I founded a company to help me do just that. I have been given a second chance, and I intend to make the most of it. Keep a positive faithful attitude, and a positive faithful life is sure to follow.