I Was on My Deathbed with Anal Cancer, Hallucinating About Chuck E. Cheese. It Inspired My New Book (Exclusive)

• Julie DeVillers is a young adult author who was diagnosed with anal cancer three years ago

• She decided to speak openly about her cancer to raise awareness and break the stigma surrounding anal cancer

• When she was in the ER for five weeks, she had thoughts and hallucinations that inspired her new book Meet Me at Wonderland

Julia DeVillers is a young adult author who was diagnosed with anal cancer three years go. Since then, the author of Read It and Weep, which became a Disney Channel Original Movie, and American Girl’s Meet Isabel and Nicki, has taken on an additional role as an outspoken advocate for anal cancer — prompted by a health crisis in 2022 when DeVillers nearly died while getting treated for the disease.

Now, she openly talks about anal cancer and the stigma surrounding it. “There is no ribbon for anal cancer. If there was, it would be brown,” she jokes to PEOPLE.

It’s that same humor that makes her new middle grade novel, Meet Me at Wonderland, so special. Inspired by her cancer struggle — and her part-time job as a teen — the novel comes out May 20, exactly three years after she received her shocking diagnosis.

DeVillers shares her story with PEOPLE’s Cara Lynn Shultz.

The idea for my book started when I was in the ICU for 5 weeks in 2022. I was literally down to a few blood cells. Hospice was called; I was on my deathbed from anal cancer.

The doctors would come in and ask me basic questions every day: They’d be like, “Do you know where you are? Who is the president? Why are you here?” And I was so out of it. I would say, “Ronald Reagan! I’m at summer camp! I’m here for the flu!”

More than once, I would say I was at Chuck E. Cheese, which is where I worked in high school. Sometimes I thought I was a teenager again, and I kept asking for music playlists from that era. I was at the Ohio State Cancer Hospital, and Ohio State’s mascot is this Brutus Buckeye, and they had a huge sticker on the wall. And I would talk to him about my own mascot time as Chuck E. Cheese.

By the way, I didn’t just work at Chuck E. Cheese. I was Chuck E. Cheese. I was in the rat costume. I was the smelly New Jersey sewer rat for part of my job.

But more on that later. Back to the cancer: My first symptom was bleeding. And my doctor told me, “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s hemorrhoids.” And I said, “Wow, I didn’t know hemorrhoids would bleed that much. It’s pretty dramatic.”

I literally was just gushing blood. They just gave me hemorrhoid cream and told me to come back in three months.

A week or two later, I thought, “This is extreme.” I went in and they said, “OK, we’ll remove the hemorrhoids. It seems pretty big. We’ll send you in for surgery.” And I thought, “Well, this is really embarrassing. What do I do? Tell people I’m having hemorrhoid surgery?”

But I go in for the hemorrhoid procedure, and I’m coming to from the anesthesia, and my husband’s holding one hand, my doctor’s holding my other hand, and they said, “It’s not a hemorrhoid, it’s cancer. And you have two tumors.” And when I asked what kind of cancer, they said, “Anal cancer.”

And I’ve never heard of anal cancer. So on the car ride home, I was googling it. There is no ribbon for anal cancer. If there was, it would be brown. And on top of that, it says that it’s usually linked to sexually transmitted HPV. So I said to my friend, “Oh no, I have slut cancer. What did I do? I’ve been married a million years!”

So the plan is six weeks of daily chemo. I’m taking pills. I then go in for radiation. Here’s where the story gets dramatic: Week three, I had a chemo infusion. I don’t know what happened, but everything that had been poured into me poured out. Like a radioactive neon green just poured out of my body. I lost more than 20 pounds in a week, and I went into the ICU and didn’t come out for 5 weeks.

I know it sounds gross, sounds horrifying, and it was horrifying. They said the chemo or radiation twisted my colon.

They called hospice, and they said she’s got 48 hours, and it could go either way. But I had 48 hours, bring the kids, bring everybody in, say their goodbyes. My husband David brought our daughter Quinn, then 22, and my son Jack, who was 18. I get choked up thinking about it.

I didn’t die. But it was then that I had the Chuck E. Cheese hallucinations.

Bottom line is that the treatment worked. Recovery took a while, but my follow-up appointments were positive; the tumors were shrinking and I was getting healthy again. After six months of intensive healing, I went to see my editor at Simon and Schuster and, since I write novels about teens, we were talking about the most embarrassing moments when you’re a teenager.

I told her about the time that I was dressed as Chuck E. Cheese, and I staggered into the break room all hot and sweaty, my hair staticky, to get some water on a break, and I saw a very hot guy filling out a job application.

And I went, “Oh no, I can’t meet him like this.” So I backed out … right into my manager, who of course made me unmask. So my editor and I were laughing about that story, and she said, “I think that’s your next book”. And that became the basis for Meet Me at Wonderland. In the book, my main character has the same kind of meet-cute — but the mascot is a moose.

In my book, Coco’s mother recently had cancer. I wanted that to be a hopeful part of the story. She went through this terrible thing, the family went through this terrible thing. Now we’re past it, and let’s focus on the joy. Her mother is recovering, and the family is having a joyous summer together.

The characters in this book really got me through cancer. And, of course, the doctors. And science.

I decided I would talk about my cancer because there’s a whole stigma of telling people it’s anal, so you don’t usually say that word. Marcia Cross and the HPV Cancer Alliance reached out to me and gave me a little bit of a platform. It’s why I talk about it, especially as colorectal cancer rates are rising.

I have a mirror that a friend sent me and it says, “This is the beautiful face of ass cancer.” So I’m like, “Oh great, I’m the face of ass cancer.” But you know, it makes me smile, it makes me laugh. Okay, I’m the face of ass cancer.

Meet Me at Wonderland is out May 20, available wherever books are sold.

Read the original article on People