Breast Cancer: A Short Story

When my mother walked into the house with a bandanna tied around her head, my first reaction was that she was sick, and this was something that many people had to experience. My mother had just got back from what I thought was the doctor's office with all of her hair gone. She told us that the sickness that she was feeling made her decide to get a new hairstyle, and I was unsure why she had decided to shave her head completely bald. I was only 9 years old, and being the oldest brother of 4, none of us had any idea of the severity that our mother was encountering.

My mother one day, asked all of us if we wanted to play tic tac toe, and of course as young children, we took that challenge immediately, my mother however, decided that she had a different way to play. She took off her bandana for the first time that day, and she said that we should play tic tac toe on her head with erasable markers. All of my brothers and I had thought that it was hilarious and we played tic tac toe over and over again that day. My

Reflecting on it now I can see that my mother was a true soldier to go through all of the pain that she had to feel, but when she came home put a smile on her face to make sure that her children were still happy. The grace and dignity that she showed when she handled this demonstrated the true traits that she had, and the traits that she wanted us to grow up to have as well. She went through so much more to just minimize the pain that we were going to feel because she knew as such young children who looked up to their mother as a hero and an idol, that we would be in distraught if anything like this happened to her. The fear that she knew we would of had was going to be much greater than anything that we would have ever felt, and she didn’t want to scare us in this