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!
