It started out as an annoying buzz. And then it grew more insistent and, over time, painful. I thought it was because I was listening to my iPod too much. I stopped using headset.

It didn't get any better. In fact, It got worse. It became more like a constant headache: rooting from my right ear, traveling all the way to my eyeballs, causing me to stop and take a deep breath whenever it attacked.

Within two weeks, I had lost half of my hearing. Over the next month I cried myself to sleep because of the pain. It's the kind of pain that made you wish you would just die. But you didn't die and instead you had to stay alive and suck it.

I went to the ENT doctor. I spent half my savings just to listen to the doctor mumbling something about a small inflammation and get some kind of medicine. The med made it worse. The second time I use it, my right ear was bleeding.

This time, I went to another ENT at another hospital which means spending the other half of my savings. This time, the doctor told me it was a granuloma.

What the heck was a granuloma, we would ask.

Apparently there's a tumor growing inside of my ear. Whether it was benign or malignant, that time God only knows. The only solution was to remove it surgically while waiting for the lab results to tell me whether it was cancer or not.

So yeah, what the heck, right. Just remove the whole thing, doc. Granulomas won't give a damn if it's three weeks before my final exams.

The surgery went well, if well means it hurts from head to toe all the way to Timbuktu.

Seven days later I went to the hospital to see my lab results. "Apparently the cells are very actively dividing. We need to do something", that was all I could hear. In my mind, I thought about my Grandpa. My aunt. My cousin, Difa. The struggle, the fight, and finally the surrender.

It was two weeks before the final exams. The final exams I had to go through in order to graduate from high school. Let me tell you, it's hard enough without a cancer. Imagine what I had to go through: bolding the answer sheet with my left hand while covering my right ear with a tissue using my right.

Right after exams, I checked into the hospital. I didn't know what they did to me. All I could remember was throwing up a lot and International Relations. Yeah, I just have to get through this so I can go to college and study about political systems and international conflicts and write essays on what happened two centuries ago that changed civilization.

And here I am now, alive and well and recovering and going to Turkey to study International Relations on a full scholarship. Here I am now, trying to blog again.