If My Blood Cancer Was For Sale

You’re probably like me. You’re online a lot. You do lots of searches. And once you’ve done those searches, you start to get ads for the things you search for. So you search “shoes” and you get ads for shoes. You search for “sourdough starter” and you get ads for baking supplies.

And if you’re like me, you probably do a lot of searches for “cancer” (or “blood cancer,” or, in my case, “follicular lymphoma”). Sometimes, those ads are unhelpful, or worse.

And sometimes they’re just plain weird.

Selling me my own cancer

This is an actual ad that appeared on my screen one day (I blocked out the name of the website):

My screenshot of the ad to buy follicular lymphoma.

That would mean that I’d get to review it, too. And that’s where it could get kind of fun.

Follicular lymphoma: User reviews

As I’ve written before, my doctor didn’t do a great job of giving me my diagnosis. She wouldn’t do it over the phone, and then made me sit in an exam room, worrying, for a half-hour. So I guess the review of my online shopping experience might be something like this:

Delivery was horrible. I asked for it to be sent to my address, but then I was told I had to pick it up myself. And even then they made me wait for it. Awful experience. 1 star out of 5.

Or maybe this: I have follicular lymphoma, one of the indolent blood cancers. They tend to grow slowly for a lot of us. Many of us, including me, can do “watchful waiting,” where we don’t get treated right away. I was able to wait for two years before treatment. So maybe my review could be something like this:

It started off really slow. Mostly I was thinking, when is this thing going to get started? It picked up after a while, but that just made me sad. Not what I expected. Awful product. 1 star out of 5.

Of course, follicular lymphoma is considered incurable, so maybe this:

Terrible return policy. This thing is awful, it’s of no use to me, and now I’m stuck with it. 1 star out of 5.

Or maybe the classic:

A friend suggested this was ‘the good kind.’ Not sure what the others are like, but one is terrible. 1 star out of 5.

Finally:

Loved it! Exactly what I was looking for! Five stars out of five!

(It seems like every product online has one fake review that someone probably got paid to post. I assume that’s what’s going on with that last one.)

Write Your Own Review

As weird as it is to see my blood cancer up for sale (or whatever is happening with the algorithm that created that ad), it’s actually kind of therapeutic to be able to review it. Try putting your own creativity to work and write a review of your blood cancer. Your “return policy” is probably as bad as mine, but at least you can tell the world how you feel.