When I tell people that I’ve had cancer, they tend to freak out a bit, either with concern or sympathy.

“Let me preface it,” I say, “I had the common cold of cancers.” It’s my own way of putting it into perspective for other people, since simply telling them “I’m fine and it was nothing” is always met with incredulous looks.

I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I didn’t even know what my thyroid did when I was diagnosed, and had no idea what treatment I was going to have to endure before I got better.

To be honest, it was very scary. My friends and family didn’t know how to respond to the news of my having thyroid cancer. It got to a point where I was having trouble telling people what was going on. I worried about them being worried so much. It made a little crazy.

At some point, between getting diagnosed and going into surgery, I made a decision to not let being sick get to me. I tried to stay calm about the whole situation and take it one day at a time. I ended up not worrying about what might or might not happen, and focused on educating myself on the disease and ensuring that nobody was worrying about me unnecessarily. I didn’t doubt that I was going to be okay.

The surgery to remove my thyroid took longer than the doctor had originally expected, but it turned out that he took extra time to keep my scar as small as possible. For the first time ever, I had to stay overnight in the hospital.

There weren’t any wheelchairs available when it was time for me to leave, so I had to walk out of the hospital myself – it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I had to stop in the lobby to rest and fell asleep in the car as soon as my seatbelt was fastened. I stayed at home with my family for two weeks after surgery, but tried to get out of the house everyday. I even went grocery shopping with my mom, wandering around the store with this bandage on my neck for everyone to see. About a week after I returned to school I received my one and only radiation treatment. I simply had to swallow a pill of radioactive iodine in order to complete my treatment. Granted, I slightly radioactive and couldn’t hug any of my friends as they all came back to school but I was still there to greet them.

By the time my first week of classes was over everything looked good and I was finished with my treatment. I still have to go to the doctor once a year and get a lot of blood work, but my life moved on almost without a hiccup and I owe a lot of that to my state of mind throughout everything.

While my cancer wasn’t going to kill me, getting sick helped me to understand the power of positive thinking. What happens when you get sick? When you have to recover from something? Your body goes to work to take care of the healing process for you. If you’re stressed and afraid throughout the healing it’s going to take longer to get better. Fear comes from the unknown so do your homework. Stress comes from worry, the unknown again, and from people around you reacting to your situation, so try to limit your exposure to what stresses you out.

Handling my situation the way I did really improved my recovery time. I was diagnosed in June, had my surgery in July, and was back in my dorm by the end of August. I could have taken a semester off of school to heal slowly, but I guarantee you I would have ended up sitting around my mother’s house bored out of my mind within a month! My positive attitude kept me moving forward and prevented cancer from taking over my life.

Here are the lessons I learned: Don’t worry, it’s out of your hands (actually just try to worry less,) do your research so you’re not afraid of what you don’t know. And finally, keep things in perspective for yourself and those around you. It’s all right to be scared, but stay calm — it helps, I swear.

I’ve been passing along this advice now for almost seven years. It’s what I told my mom when she was diagnosed with MS, and it’s what I told my best friend when an autoimmune disease made her have to permanently alter her diet. It’s even what I tell my boyfriend every time he gets the sniffles. “At least it’s not cancer,” I joke with him.

I’ve got a scar in the center of my neck from the surgery that removed the tumor and my thyroid. It’s something that I think about almost everyday. But, I’m not sad it happened and I’ve had a clean bill of health ever since. In a lot of ways, it’s made the difficult things in life easier to get through. Nothing is really as bad as it seems when you take a step back, relax, and really put your situation into perspective.