My Day Of The Surgery

Why did my mommy have to have cancer? Whatever it was I knew I did not like it. It made her cry and made me want to fix what God had done to her. A few weeks passed by, full of testing and doctors’ visits. She had to go into the hospital for surgery one day.

My grandmother first got sick in November of 2014. She got diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors said they caught it early, but they could not surgically remove it so she had to take chemo and radiation.

After several hours of flight, mother and daughter landed in Houston where an overwhelming sense of peace embraced on them. Surgery was scheduled for Monday but after the x-rays came back doctors immediately took her into surgery. There they found several tumors, one that caused significant damage. This particular tumor had eaten part of her vertebrae and compressed her spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed. After surgery Billie began to ask God if it was her time to leave.

“If we had found it any later, he would have died,” my dad’s doctor told my mother; it took the hospital too long to realized that my dad’s appendix had ruptured. The hospital had kept misdiagnosing him, and they were now trying to convince my mom the hospital wasn’t at fault. At the time, I was only eleven years old, and I was too naïve to know what was going on. However, I could see that everyone in my family was stressed about my father’s surgery he just had and his condition. In the past few days my mother had only been home for an hour a day to take a shower and have a snack.

“I was so bitter and cynical,” Joy T. said. “I thought there was no point of going to school if I could just die tomorrow.” Steindorf, O’Daniell, and Joy T. didn’t realize their psychological distress was related to their cancer experience — they had survived, after a... ... middle of paper ... ... “The first session she asked, ‘This is the first time you’re coming to therapy?’” Joy T. said. “She told me [my anxiety] was totally normal — I got to talk about a lot of things.” Several years after she dropped out of high school, Joy T. earned her GED. She recently completed her bachelor’s degree in science and healthcare leadership. Steindorf opted not to see a therapist — instead she takes an anti-depressant and leans on her family for support.

In both stories, the authors reveal that by living each day to the fullest they are able to create a sense of normalcy in their lives without focusing too much on the daily challenges that come about because of their illnesses. In Jamie Weisman's As I live and Breath, she developed a sense of normalcy through family because they gave her all the love and support and treated her the same way they would if she was not ill. Her mother and father are her main support and motivation to be all that she is able to be regardless of her illness. Weisman has a form of congenital immune deficiency that causes her immune system to have a hard time fighting of bacteria and other viral infections as Wyatt 2 well as a healthy immune system. She has been through surgeries and many infections and she always had to give herself hope by being ambitious.

I was in fifth grade then so they did not tell us everything but I knew what it was my little sister had cancer. My parents told me that she had a tumor in the back of her head the size of a golf ball. I was scared because a friend of mine from school told me that her grandma had just died form cancer so I thought my sister was going to die too I started to cry. My parents calmed me done and told me that Katie's cancer is not bad and the doctors are going to do everything they can. They need to remove the tumor from her brain because it is putting pressure spinal cored and on her brain and thats what is making her throw up.

After a week, she felt something was wrong with her body and she turned up pregnant with her fifth child. Her cousins, Sadie and Margaret, told her that the pain probably had something to do with the baby. “However, Henrietta said that it was not, because the knot is there before the baby” (Skloot 36). After her son was born, Henrietta told her husband, David Lack, to bring her to the doctor because she was bleeding in her vagina when it was not her time. They went to a clinic at Johns Hopkins hospital.

In December of 2006 each and every one of my family members life had turned up side down. What I want to say is that my parents near death experience provoked a sad emotion I wish to never experience again in my life. My entire family was in a panic, after receiving the news I just stayed in my room, quiet.It all began with my mother going for a check up at the doctors, she was worried that she felt a lump on her breast. As a child I didn’t know what to think of that...breast cancer? All that came to mind was "death", it turned out that she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

I want to be apart of saving someone 's life just like my grandmothers nurse saved her life. When my grandmother had a stroke, she had to be in the hospital for like two weeks. Her blood pressure would be going up and down and her sugar levels would not want to stay stable either. The nurse she had her name was rachel, she had the biggest smiles I had ever seen. She loved my grandmother she would come and chat with us anytime she could.