The "C" word......

And no, I’m not talking about THAT word. The word you think I am referring to can have lots of meanings; female genitalia; the idiot that cut you off on the highway;  your ex wife/ex  girlfriend etc., etc.  That word has never bothered me, it’s just a slang word that is used to be hurtful or raunchy. The word I’m talking about is the most powerful word in the English language and has one meaning and one meaning only. And when spoken out of the mouth of a doctor directed at you or someone you love has the power to literally change your life in a matter of seconds, forever. Your entire world, as you know it, changes in those few seconds.  Things flash in your mind, things you never even thought about thinking before.  You are then shuffled like beer bottles in a factory down (what seems like) a never ending conveyor belt of tests,  xrays,  MRI’s, biopsies, blood work, and Doctor appointments. You are expected to make critical decisions about things you have not the slightest idea about. You hear people talking but you can’t make out what they are saying. All that is going on in your head is that word “CANCER”.

                We all take life for granted. There is not one person that doesn’t.  And anyone who tells me they don’t, I will call a Liar, because if we didn’t take life for granted we would spend every minute of every day curled up in a fetal position, under our warm fuzzy blanket, in a closet, terrified of what could happen today. Walking out your front door, you could be hit by a falling tree. Standing in your front yard an out of control car could run over you. So many things could happen and any given moment and if we didn’t take life for granted and continue on with our lives we would be paralyzed with fear and be in that closet with fuzzy warm blankets where we thought we were safe….until we realize that a plane could fall out of the sky and land on our house…It could happen.  

                I am a nurse. I worked as a trauma nurse for 12 years.  I have a little more insight than most about the freakish things that could happen. Because of that, I have tried to live my life by not taking it for granted. I have tried to be thankful for everything I have. I figure, I may not have much, but I have a wonderful family/friends and I love my children more than anything on this earth and I am thankful for all of them. When my daughter broke her arm falling off a zipline, I was thankful that she only broke her arm and not her neck. Whenever something doesn’t go right in my life, I try and look at it from the perspective that “It could be worse, look at the poor people who have had to bury a child, or the people who have to send their loved one off to war not knowing if they will ever come back again, I can deal with this (whatever the “this” may be at the time)”.  When some idiot cuts me off and I swerve out of the way from being smashed in a car accident, I am thankful I was able to swerve and not have been in the accident. No matter how conscious I am about trying not to take the world for granted, I still do, Everyday.  I wake up, get ready, put my kids on the bus, go out the door to start my day. If I didn’t take it for granted, I would be a basket case every day worrying about the school bus crashing on the way to school with my kids in it, or worrying about a plane smashing through my house when I went back home to fill up my coffee before work, or worrying everyday about the possibility of someone I deeply love being diagnosed with cancer. We don’t worry about those things, because we don’t want to be that person in the closet in a fetal position with fuzzy blankets. We just want life to go on as it is, without any worries.  But when one of those worries is handed to you on a silver platter, you realize how it absolutely changes EVERYTHING!!!

                My Mother, my best friend, my hero, raised us as a single mother (back in the days when single mothers weren’t popular). My Father left when I was six and my brother was 2, we didn’t see him much and he never paid child support. When I was 12 he disappeared and never came back.  My mother raised two children completely on her own, sometimes working two/three jobs at a time to support us (back when women didn’t make as much money as men, because they were women).  She taught me that there was “NOTHING I couldn’t do as long as I put my mind to it and did my best”. She taught me how to fix household appliances,  move heavy furniture, change spark plugs in cars, carry heavy air conditioner window units from the basement to the second floor without any help from any one, stand up for myself, and that it was more important to be a kind, caring, generous person, than it was to be right. She has supported every decision I ever made, most of which she knew were wrong, but also knew that I needed to learn it for myself, because that was the only way to truly learn it. Then she was there to dry my tears and pick up my pieces when those decisions didn’t turn out so well. She truly is my best friend. She has been through everything with me, including the birth of my children, and has now become my children’s best friend.

Two weeks ago a doctor spit out the “C” word when talking about my Mom.  That powerful word that changes your whole life. That word that I NEVER wanted to hear in the same sentence as my mom’s name. That word that I took for granted every day, and if It did somehow try to slip into my thoughts, I refused to let it in so I wouldn’t end up in a fetal position with warm fuzzy blankets in my closet.  It’s strange, actually, how it all happened….. I had a mammogram done a few weeks ago. On a Friday, I received a letter stating that my mammogram was abnormal and that I needed to contact my doctor immediately to arrange for further testing. I was a mess, terrified that I had the “C” word. My mother rushed to my side, hugged me and bought me “don’t worry about your boobies gifts” over the weekend. Yet, she worried about me all to herself, begging the higher power to let it be her and not me.  My follow up appointment was on Tuesday. My mom INSISTED she go with me. She refused to take no for an answer.  She figured while she was there, she would just get her mammogram over with too, because she knew she was late. She has been taking care of my elderly grandparents for the last few years and all of her time is spent running them back and forth to appointments and running errands for them, cooking and cleaning and doing their laundry, so she hasn’t taken care of herself.  So there we sat, best friends in our “boobie gowns”, laughing, cracking jokes, trying to take the stress off of what my results were going to be. My AWESOME friend, Kathy (who is worthy of a whole other blog just to make it clear how awesome she is), did my tests and gave us the all clear, I WAS FINE!!! Yay!! My Mom and I were so happy. Relief! We waited for her results, but they were running behind. So they told us they would call the next day. We thought “Ok, I’m sure it’s fine, we just got great news that mine was good, what are the chances that hers would be abnormal?” They called the next day, told her it was abnormal and that she needed to come back in. So, “here we go again”, we thought, thinking it was going to be the same outcome as mine. Matter of fact we had the whole day planned out, we would go get the test, then go to lunch, then go shopping. …That’s NOT how the day went, at all….. After her tests, we were told they found something very serious. The next thing I knew, we had spent all day at the hospital being herded like cattle from test to test and were sitting in a surgeons office being told my Mom, my BFF, my hero had the “C” word. As soon as he said the word, I could not understand anything else. His voice was no longer comprehensible, it sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice.  I was worthless at that moment, as a daughter and especially as a nurse.  I watched as my always brave, always stoic, always humorous mother turned to stone. She just stared straight ahead. I knew what she was thinking, not only were we just told she had breast cancer, but one of her biggest fears lied ahead, she would have to get a chest xray. My mother (and I)is (was) a smoker. It was her only vice. She had a very rough life and She never drank, never did drugs, but she smoked. She tried to quit many times, with no success. I worry about her all the time and wished she would quit, but who was I to complain? I was a smoker too. About a month ago I decided to quit, mostly because I was worried about her and her chronic cough she’s had for months. I begged her to go to the doctor, but she refused, worrying they would do a chest xray and tell her she had lung cancer. It was always her biggest fear, so she lived in the “What I don’t know, won’t hurt me” mode. So, I figured the only way to get her to quit was if I quit with her. We both tried, but fell off the wagon. Now, with all this whirlwind of breast cancer, she had no choice but to face her biggest fear. My mother has NEVER been afraid of anything in her life. I’ve watched her walk around a dark, quiet house with a baseball bat when we thought we had a burglar many times, Every year I watch her go on the highest roller coaster at Hershey Park because the kids want her to, I’ve seen her pick up snakes barehanded out of her garden and let them go into the woods, but the fact that she knew she had no choice but to have a chest xray took all the life out of her beautiful face.  As we walked from the surgeon’s office to the xray department, I held my shit together, holding her hand, telling her “It’s ok, we will get through this, whatever it is, we will get through it together”.  When they finally took her back, I lost my shit. I was sobbing uncontrollably. I was never so afraid of anything in my life. And knowing how afraid she was, made me all the more afraid. She came out sooner than I was expecting and caught me crying. She then went into “Mom” mode and apologized for “her having to upset me like this”. She was apologizing to me! Hugging me and telling me how sorry she was that this made me so sad. That’s my Mom, that’s the kind of person she is. On the drive home she told me, she wasn’t worried about the breast cancer, she was worried about lung cancer. I made a deal with her that the minute we got the results from her chest xray back that we would quit smoking, together. She agreed.

I have always waxed and waned about my belief system and what exactly I do believe in. So, I’ve never been one to take a stand on or against religion or have anything to say about anyone else and what they believed.  I always liked to believe that everything happens for a reason and that there is some sort of higher power, but when I see children being sexually abused, murdered or dying of horrible diseases while suffering, it kind of takes the ‘everything happens for a reason’ possibility out of the mix for me, because what purpose could that serve and what reason could that possibly have? Anyway, I told my mom that if her chest xray was good, that we were given a second chance and that maybe this was our wake up call to quit smoking. I prayed to everything and anything that I thought was out there, begging them to please let it not be lung cancer too. I promised to quit smoking and to make my Mom quit smoking if they could just let it NOT be lung Cancer. Here I was, begging for it to only be Breast cancer. Sounds crazy, but I know my Mom would fight breast cancer. Lung cancer was her kryptonite and I knew that would be the end of her if they said THAT “C” word, she would give up.

Luckily, we received good news that her chest xray was clear. I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. And we both quit smoking!! 1 week and 4 days, So far. We will never go back, but it is hard, especially when we are still dealing with her having Breast Cancer.  We met with the doctor today and all came to a decision that my mom will have a mastectomy. We have a long road ahead. I realize that we all have to face the reality that our parents will die before us and that it’s part of life, I realize that I am lucky to have had mom my around for as long as I have, and I realize that other people face far worse problems than me, But I was just not ready to let my Mom go just yet. She’s only 64, has finally retired and able to enjoy herself from a life long journey of working hard and taking care of everyone else.  I want as many years as I possibly can with her and for my children to learn what an amazing, strong wonderful woman she is. I will stand by her every step of this journey to fight the “C” word, but I will call it “CANCER” because I refuse to be afraid of that word and I refuse to let that word destroy my family. I will be strong for my Mom and I will remind her of her own words to me “There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it and try your best.”  I’d like to say we will kick cancers ass, I don’t know if we will or not, but we will give it our best shot. We will fight it with everything we have and we will do it together, me and my BFF.

I’m not sure exactly why I wrote this. Maybe to get it off my chest, maybe to put it somewhere other than my head. I don’t know, I just sat down and wrote it. Some people may have something to say about me putting my feelings and family’s medical problems out there for the world to see. But anyone who knows me, knows that I am what you see. I have no secrets, no hidden skeletons in my closet. I wear my heart on my sleeve, I always have (which could possibly explain my 3 marriages- but that’s another blog for another time).  I have no problem with people knowing about my personal life, because that’s what makes me, me. My Mom taught me that too. ;)

 I do want to thank all my wonderful, supportive, loving friends for all the texts, posts, inboxes, emails and phone calls through all this. Anyone who has ever met my mom fell in love with her, so I thank you all for caring so much about her, and about me. I have the best family and friends in the world! Thank you all! And as much as I want to go to the closet in a fetal position with a warm fuzzy blanket, we will keep fighting, we will carry on, trying not to take life for granted, and be thankful for everything we have. Peace out, my friends!