A recently returned LDS missionary received the shock of being diagnosed with cancer and decided to face the battle with optimism and humor in his new blog.

Orem resident Sean Lee, 20, said he began feeling pain in his left side when he was in ninth grade. Lee said when he would go see a doctor, they could never find anything wrong and the pain would subside after several days so he would never schedule a follow-up appointment.

“By the time they said, ‘Give it like a week and if it still hurts, come back,’ and it would never still hurt so I would just never go back,” Lee said.

The pain continued off and on for several years, including during his LDS mission in New York City. However, doctors still couldn’t find a conclusive answer for the pain and so Lee “figured it was nothing.”

Lee returned home from his mission on Feb. 4 and lost 14 pounds in two weeks. As a result, on March 14, he said he discovered a lump on his side that he’d never noticed before and he decided to get it tested. During his CT scan, Lee received an injection that made his “insides look like Christmas,” he wrote on his blog.

“The injection was really weird,” he wrote. “It literally felt like icy hot was pouring into my veins. At least I had a ‘hot body’ for once?”

On April 10, Lee was diagnosed with synovial cell sarcoma, a very rare soft-tissue cancer, that he refers to on his blog as “this soccer ball tumor of death inside of me.” He began chemotherapy on April 14 and decided to document his experience with the blog, “I Can-Cer Vive.”

Read the full story on KSL.