My First Semester At Community College

After bouncing back from a challenging first semester at community college, I looked forward to a positive spring semester. To the common eye, I seemed like a normal student who was just trying to follow their plans of successfully completing the semester with a great academic performance across the board. It was roughly the fifth week into the semester. Confident in all my classes, my academic performance reflected the time and dedication I was putting into school. It was at the end of February that everything suddenly changed. My mother began to mention how she was feeling minor pain with in her pelvic area with occasional fatigue. Not wanting to take any risks, we set up an appointment with her doctor to get this checked out. After performing a biopsy, my mother was diagnosed with stage 2 endometrial cancer. With my immediate response being denial, my family and I began to freeze and slowly but surely found ourselves in a state of shock. It was the peak time in my academic year; I had to suddenly manage new and terrifying realities in my personal life along with my already challenging academic courses at school. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,

Although I lost temporary interest in school, I knew that letting this crisis take all my hopes away was not going to lead to anywhere positive. I knew that my mother wouldn't want it and that I decided to let my fears and anxieties fuel myself to get back on track and refocus. The following weeks I scheduled brief meetings with my professors in order to catch up on what I needed to get done. Through this whole ordeal, I had to figure out how to give attention to my mother, and to school, without losing complete focus on either. Towards the end of the semester, I found myself with strong grades in all but one of my courses, which ironically ended up being my calculus class, which I still managed to complete with a C