Super Avi: Episode 7

inter. The very word can conjure bleak dreary gray images. It’s cold and snowy outside the days are short and life can begin to feel pretty monotonous. Interestingly though winter can also be a time for great memories. What’s cozier than drinking hot cocoa while watching snow pile up outside your window? Bundling up and going sledding with your siblings and friends? Sometimes life is all about perspective — things change depending on the way we look at them. Which is something Avi is excellent at doing. I asked him for his take on winter and here are some of his thoughts.

Winter

The winter can be a time where life is pretty boring. It’s really cold outside (at least in New York) so you can’t do much outdoors and the day is short. When I wasn’t in school the winter months were the hardest and most depressing for me. I couldn’t be outside for two reasons. One because it was freezing so there wasn’t much to do outside and two because even if I did want to take a walk or something I had a big chance of getting a cold which would have been very bad and dangerous for me. (I mentioned in a previous column that when you’re on chemotherapy your body can’t fight infections so getting sick is super dangerous.) It was really hard for me to not to be in school. Even though school itself is very hard at least you’re doing something during the day. I was stuck at home inside without much to do.

At the time I also couldn’t eat which definitely made winter more depressing. I could have spent my time just being in a bad mood because of my situation but instead I found a creative solution: I love the summer and I was desperate for warm weather so during the winter months I used to watch video clips about the summer like water videos and how to make summer refreshments. I also ordered a sprinkler and some other water sport activities just to keep me going until spring would finally arrive. Some people might think this would put me in a worse mood to see all of the things I couldn’t do but it worked for me!

My Story

A few days before I was diagnosed my family took a skiing trip to Okemo Mountain in Vermont for the weekend. I love to ski and always looked forward to our trips. That time though my brothers were complaining that I was making weird sounds at night. I also had a little bit of a hard time skiing. Little did we know then that the reason for my weird night noises and skiing difficulties was that I had a huge tumor sitting in my chest! I skied for three days with a tumor in my chest! Literally 12 days after our skiing trip I was diagnosed. Later my family joked that I went from Okemo to chemo.

The next year we weren’t able to go on a skiing vacation because I was so sick and barely able to go outside for a walk. Last winter though I was finally feeling well enough for another skiing trip and we went back to Vermont for the first time since I was diagnosed. Going back to Vermont was very emotional for me. I felt so many different emotions about being back there. It was weird like I was the same person going on the same trip I had gone on in the past but so much had changed. We have two pictures of my family on the slopes one from the year I was diagnosed and one from the first year I went back. If you look at the pictures you might think they look pretty similar but only someone who knows what we went through in those two years can understand how different everything really was.

First of all I was still getting chemo when I went back but I was still so grateful to be back in Okemo!