Young adult Brendan Zurica joins The Lighthouse Podcast to share his journey battling diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He shares about his first diagnosis and treatment right before his senior year of high school, and then facing relapse twice several years later. He includes details of his treatment and the timeline of it all, as well as the toll it all took on his mental health. Brendan is very open about how important talking to a psychologist proved to be, and how he wishes he had begun therapy earlier in his journey. He also shares about the unique challenges of being a teenager and then young adult in a children's hospital, and what it was like to transition to making his own decisions for his health between his first and second diagnoses. Brendan also explains the untold pressures of survivorship—the pressure to accomplish greatness after having been given a second—or third or fourth—chance at life, and how therapy has helped him process all that and move forward in healthy, balanced ways.
