My Day Of The Surgery

When I was seven my life was changed. After many scans and tests, we found out that my grandmother had pancreatic cancer. Walking into my grandmother’s house the night before she had to go into surgery, I kept telling myself she would be fine. While sitting on the couch talking about anything and everything that didn’t have to do with the surgery itself, we all couldn’t be more nervous. No one wanted to face the fact the she had to go through this. As my sister and I told my grandma, “good luck” and reassured her everything would be okay, we all new how dangerous this surgery was. My grandmother was operated on in Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the doctor said she would be fine, but as time went on we found out that she wasn’t going to be fine. The day of the surgery, I came home from school to hear that something had happened during surgery. The doctor told my family that my grandmother had become septic which forced a second surgery and a move to the intensive care unit (ICU) for three weeks, where she had to be put on life support. Being septic causes all your organs to not to function properly or at all. The most frustrating part of this happening was not knowing why it happened and no one taking responsibility for it.
After many days, my grandmother was still in the hospital getting worse. My aunts and my mom never left her side. They would take shifts every day and night to make sure she was never left alone. Most of the time they were the ones taking care of her because the nurses didn’t want to be bothered. The cancer was spreading rapidly through her body and we couldn’t do anything to help her. All that we could do was make her as comfortable as possible as she went through this. Hoping and praying that a miracle wa...

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... see how great my family is as a result of all that they had done for her. I am no longer angry, I know that she would be very grateful to my family for all they did to help. Even though it consumed all of our lives for a long period of time, I would do it again for her in a heartbeat. I am ashamed that I felt at all jealous because my mom needed to be with her my grandma and I should have understood that. She has always been an inspiration and a role model to me and I am glad that I got to be a part of helping her fight the battle of her life. She taught me some much about how to be a strong, independent, hardworking, and kind person. I would do anything to be a little bit more like her. One thing it showed me is that everyone makes mistakes, including doctors and caregivers; nobody is perfect. Even though this was a bad situation it made me and my family stronger.