Maybe it’s because I never experienced any symptoms before being diagnosed. Maybe it’s because early a stage Hodgkin’s has such a good prognosis. Maybe it’s because I never lost my hair.

Whatever the reason, throughout this process I’ve never felt like a “cancer patient.”

Despite having been exposed to the spectrum of cancer in my profession, the archetypal “cancer patient” still exists in my mind. It’s the middle aged woman wearing a knit cap to cover her head, bald from chemotherapy. It’s the cachectic 60 year old former smoker, now being fed through a gastric tube after having his throat ravaged by high dose radiation. It’s the three year old boy, confined to the pediatric cancer ward while being treated for Leukemia thanks to chemotherapy wiping out his ability to fight infection.

It’s not the 29 year old male who spends two months getting chemotherapy, while continuing to work and run multiple days a week.

I don’t mean to diminish what I went through. Chemotherapy sucked. Every other week for two months I felt awful. But, I never experienced a major side effect. I never had to go the emergency room or be hospitalized for a neutropenic fever. One month out from my last infusion the healing scar over my right upper chest where my port used to be is the only visible trace of my cancer diagnosis.

In the grand scheme of cancer, I got off pretty easy.

Yet, paradoxically, I’ve spent more time thinking of my cancer diagnosis in the past couple weeks after my PET scan came back showing full response. When I was diagnosed I didn’t feel particularly threatened by the cancer itself because I was focused of the excellent prognosis. When I was on chemotherapy I was too focused on making it through those two months to worry about the actual cancer being treated.

Now, with my Hodgkin’s in remission and my body recovering from chemo, my mind has been freed to worry about the small possibility of relapse. It’s not a crippling or overwhelming paranoia, rather a lingering notion lurking in back of my mind. One which occasionally boils to the surface.

My hands occasionally creep to the side of my neck, checking to make sure the once grape-sized node still feels like a pea. This weekend I had my first relapse nightmare, vividly dreaming of reviewing my follow-up scan and seeing the cancer back with a vengeance in new spots throughout my body.

I’m sure none of these feelings are at all unique. In fact, I’d venture to guess that most people who battle cancer experience anxiety about relapse in the weeks, months and even years after achieving remission.

Cancer is perhaps the most existential affliction we as humans can experience. It’s more complicated than battling a foreign invader like a bacterial infection. Cancer strips away the conceit that humanity is some perfect creation only susceptible to outside contamination. The DNA code in cancer cells is derived from the same DNA that brought us from zygotes to incredibly complex organisms. Once you’ve been forced to face this truth — that a chance mutation could cause a group of cells bearing our own DNA to turn homicidal — it’s impossible not to battle occasional fear of it happening again.

I didn’t lose my hair. I went on runs instead of being confined to a hospital room. But cancer leaves no one completely unscarred.