Personal Reflective Essay: Pancreatic Cancer

On February 13, 2015, my mother died of cancer. She was first diagnosed with Stage one pancreatic cancer in 2011. I was thirteen years old and didn’t fully understand in what ways my mother having cancer would affect me. My parents sheltered me from the details of her original diagnosis, and told me only what I needed to know. After a year of surgeries and treatments, she went into remission and was cancer free. Periodically, she went in for examinations and P.E.T scans. Two years later in 2014, she relapsed with Stage four pancreatic cancer, and the doctors gave her a life expectancy of six months to a year. To hear the news that my mother was most likely going to die within a year was heart wrenching, it was something I didn’t expect to happen.

Being unaware of what the future held was something that became tough to handle. Watching my mother go through her treatments taught me to persist through any difficulty that I encounter. Towards the end, she looked like a shell of a person, but still in some way managed to be a beacon of hope, saying that she would be the miracle and the one to defy the odds. Her positivity when faced with these terrible circumstances gave me a fresh outlook on life. I began to understand how unpredictable the world is and how it can all change in the blink of an eye. The strong influence that my mother had on me was something I didn’t grasp until she was no longer here. It made me realize that at times I had taken her for granted. This made me learn to take advantage of every opportunity and moment because I don’t know when it could be my last my last. Her last couple of days were difficult for my whole family. One day I received a call at school from my father saying that this was the dreaded day that we knew was coming, and we headed to the hospital. After two days in the hospital, the time came to say