Descriptive Essay - Slippery Slope

I continued to watch and listen, hearing doctors yelling for anodynes to relieve any sort of pain a patient was feeling, and residents running like animals trying to find something to ease the pain, like anesthesia. I began to get tired of all the crazy in the operating room, so I decided to head to the waiting room, where all sorts of people come trying to find answers to relieve their pain. Usually, the people who sit in the waiting room don’t have any sort of life threatening disease, even though they think they do. I sat on an open chair next to a table. On the table was a book titled, “The Book of Pathology”, with the subtitle “All You’ll Ever Need to Know About Disease”. I flipped through, and after about a minute of trying to read, I realized a book on the cause and effects of disease wasn’t the most interesting subject for a 15-year-old. I picked up a gossip magazine and decided that this was the more interesting choice of reading. Reading in awe of the breakup between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, I began to hear someone talking. The only person near me was a man with a puppet on his hand that was sleeping. I went back to reading, thinking nothing of it. A minute later I heard someone talking but still, the only person next to me was the man with a

In the fall of 2012, my mother almost succumbed to her illness. I had just begun my freshman year of high school midst angry conversations between my parents and the threat of separation. It would seem as if they bickered about the most irrelevant things, almost as if they had no other reason to fight other than the fight itself. Those moments were excruciatingly lonely, my father worked until the dead of night and my mother would come home exhausted from treatment. I now know that there was no one who felt more unvalued than my mother. I wish I had the ability to iron away this blunder that destiny had fabricated, however foolish this desire is.

I sat there in my room with tears flowing down my blush pink cheeks. Wondering what was wrong with me, as a salty tear ran along my dried out chapped lips. I thought to myself,” Why am I so miserable? What did I do to deserve this? How am I going to escape this life?” I started to ponder that this was the end of my life, this is how I was going to be, sorrowful. At the lowest point of my life, mother came barging through the door with the look of cavernous concern on her face. She knew that it was time for something to be done, whether I agreed or not.

That day when I returned home from school, my mom’s boyfriend called me asking to speak to my grandmother. Typically, Gus would call my grandmother himself if he wanted to speak with her, which was rare. I found out about my mom going to the hospital from my grandmother after that phone call. The doctor told my family that a stroke afflicted her in the middle of the day. My mom confused the date with her birthday, had trouble getting words out and remembering our family member’s names. The nurse had to take her for walks periodically and exercise her legs and arms because they were weak. Seeing my mother in this condition made me appreciate my mother and everything she does for me tremendously. However, I was terrified for my mother’s health.

Five years ago, my mother had a brain aneurysm that she shouldn’t have survived. It was traumatic and damaging and to this day she still isn’t right. The point i’m trying to make is that no matter how much you want time to stay the same, it doesn’t. Many mistakes have been made since then, and a lot has been learned. I wouldn’t want to repeat the past if my life depended on it. After my mother had two major heart defects by the time the brain aneurysm occurred I wasn’t ready to give up my mom. We found out just a short time later that it could’ve been prevented if she would’ve made better choices in her life. My life five years ago was undeniably the worst part of my eighteen almost nineteen years on this earth. I stayed in a hospital waiting room for three months just looking for a sign she would wake back up. No one’s ever said why a waiting room is actually called a waiting room. It’s called this because you are waiting on the rest of your life to unfold, waiting to find out if you’ll ever speak to someone again, just waiting on an answer. It is horrifying to walk down a hallway squeezing your brother’s hand so hard he has to tell you to loosen up all to sit in a waiting room and wait on your fait. So my life was not at all glamorous but it got me where I am today, so really I can’t complain. What made me happy after that was watching my mother wake up and finally life started to get back

I vividly remember that chilly night in March as I walked out of Fifer, the building my father now calls home, for the first time. I had goosebumps, but they were not from the cold I felt hit my skin. Instead, they were from the sickness in my stomach. As I got in the car, I began to cry and had to stop myself from running back inside. My entire world had turned upside-down. How could I go home without my father? How could I leave him in a nursing home, a place where he was too young and mentally fit to be confined? I had to fight the feeling that he didn’t belong. I had to remind myself of why he chose to be there, and I hated it.

Five years ago, my mother was rushed to the hospital for an aneurysm. For the next two weeks, my family and I sat huddled around her bed in the intensive-care unit, oscillating between panic, fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion.

I was told pretty early that he had broken his neck, but I had no idea what that really meant. I didn’t really understand what the word ‘quadriplegic‘ entailed. In my mind, my interpretation was that one-day I would help my dad walk again. I envisioned him taking slow, unsteady steps, but once I learned what paralysis really meant that image was shattered. Never walk again. The words took a while to sink in, but my mind was already reeling. I became more aware of the adaptations I was going to have to make as his daughter, the alterations in the routine and activities that directly affected my life, and my fear of the unknown. This was not the type of problem that had a clear-cut solution. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Conflicts arise everyday that demand determination and creative thinking to solve. I’ve learned how to step up to those tasks and take the

Feelings of desperation and worry flourished my body as I watched my mother with tubes in her mouth getting rushed to the operating room. “Is mommy going to make it out alive?”. “Will I become an orphan?”. These are the exact thoughts that were running through my mind. In life one minute you could be decorating your Christmas tree and the other you're sitting in an uncomfortable chair of the

"In life, there are times when we choose our challenges and other times when the challenges simply choose us” - Travis Roy. I don’t remember what happened to me, I was told I was hit by a car. I was placed in a medically induced coma, for a month. Slowly, the doctor lowered the sedatives to see how I can breathe on my own, within six weeks everything was removed. I woke up; there were family and friends around my hospital bed. I was confused because I had no idea what happened. Mom and Uncle Ray told me stories about how angry I was and would try to get out of bed.

At that point all I would ever hear from people was, “oh you poor thing”, or “I’m sorry!” The only thing I heard was people pitying me, but in contrary, those words and moments only sparked a strength that I never thought was achievable. I promised myself to turn those words that represented sorrow into drive to fuel that strength. The first memory that I realized that inner strength was when I was first told that I had cancer. I heard the door click open, five doctors appeared in their white coats, they would come in surrounding me at the hospital bed. I just laid there confused about why all of this was happening. None of them spoke for a minute. My guess is that they were trying to figure out how to tell a fourteen-year-old that she has cancer as if they expected me to start breaking down sobbing. Instead, my eyes refused to shed a single tear as just hearing the words, “ You have cancer.” Those three words turned my life upside down in a matter of a second. Then I proceeded to process them in my mind. Trying to calculate a solution as if it were a math problem. As if it was that easy, but I still managed to ask the question that I never

In a way, the diagnosis was a relief. We finally had a name to match months of agony. At the same time, we all understood how this story would end. The doctors at Columbia University who had finally made the diagnosis after months of hospital stays, testing, and painful procedures were all incredibly encouraging and supportive. The home nurses and hospice workers quickly became a part of our family. Their compassion, attention to detail, and

It took the doctors five months to find my dad’s real diagnostic. He had many doctor appointments, but he still went to work, and my family and I had to keep on living. After school one day, my mom told me my dad needed major surgery on his pancreas. I was very demented because I guess I really did not understand his situation. I thought he would need just a little chemotherapy and he would get superior from there, however I was wrong.

I will never forget my last day in the hospital after being diagnosed. Finally after nearly a month of bad food and sharing a room with a four year old having just been diagnosed with cancer they were finally letting me leave. I almost felt out of place returning back to my home Pulling up on my driveway I felt scared; I knew my life had changed forever. I distinctly remember clutching at my wrist, the wrist where my hospital identification bracelet was as if I was missing something. I tried holding back my tears; however, the more I tried the more futile it seemed. I kept replaying the doctor’s voice in my head, the voice I overheard from the hall when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Your son is very sick. His life is about to change forever and it will take time for him to adjust “ the doctor said to my mom. Thinking back to this, I can only dream of discovering Emerson then; how much better these last few years would have been if I had. I could

What is going on? Shouldn’t the medicine be helping not making it worse? Did we even got to a real doctor?” I cried out. As I moved my head to look at my mom her eyes turned glossy like glass as she looked away not even able look at me. My dad took care of me that night so my mom could get some sleep. I didn’t sleep for longer than 10 minutes at a time. The stabbing knife in my stomach, throwing up at the sight of my medicine, and not being able to care for myself. These feelings overwhelmed me and I couldn’t bare it.