It Was August 18, 2014, Just Another Beautiful Summer Day.

When my dad came home that evening he sat me down and asked me if I knew what cancer was. I had an idea so I just nodded my head, he went on to tried to explain to me how bad the cancer was that my mom had been diagnosed with. Seeing my dad so afraid scared me. The fear I felt then led me to realize that I needed to try and hide it because it would only hurt my dad more to see his children so upset. I did my best to help, I tucked my little sisters into bed while my mom was away at the hospital, read them stories and did the best I could at preparing snacks to comfort them. After my mom arrived home and she recovered from the surgery she started chemotherapy. The miserable treatment that attacks the cancer also makes her very ill. Every other week she was sick. Before every bad week I wanted to cry, but that wouldn’t help anyone. Lane and Kenna already were crying, if I cried it could only hurt my parents

The calendar read July 28, 2014 as I laid on a cold, hard hospital bed awaiting the results of my MRI scan. My waiting came to a sudden end when the Oncologist entered the room with a sorrowful look revealing I had stage 4A Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Lost for words, as I sat in disbelief of the news, tears began to run down my face. Oddly, my tears were not of sadness. At the time, crying just felt like the natural thing to do. My body physically reacted before my mind could even begin to process the information.

They (my family and doctors), for the first night, weren’t sure if I would make it or not. I was touch and go, because my oxygen level couldn’t be stabilized. I would be on oxygen and my level would be normal, but as soon as they took me off, my level would fall again. However, they had to stabilize me before they could do any kind of surgery. During this time, I think my dad as well as everyone involved got a taste of what it means that any moment, any day could be anyone’s final moment. My dad stayed every night with me. The first night, my heart quit beating twice. The first time, my dad said, “She’s a fighter, she can get through this.”. Then it happened again and my dad fell on his knees saying, “God, please don’t take her now!”. I ended up practically living in SICU for 3½ weeks, just trying to become stable enough, so I could make it somewhere else. Both my mom and dad had to become durable power of attorneys, so they could decide what my treatments would

During the month of October, I was told over the phone that my Godfather, the only father figure I have, was diagnosed with cancer two years ago. Based of my mother’s reaction to my gasp and sudden questions that she refused to answer, I could tell that she wasn’t planning on telling me in the first place. This information that my mother slipped up and said shook my whole world. Not only the fact that my “father” has a disease that kills daily but the fact that everyone knew but me. I was devastated, I instantly hung up the phone and called my “father”. He proclaimed that my mother volunteered to tell me when he was first diagnosed and he thought I knew all this time. My “father” is the reason I looked into Dr. Sebi, not only has he found a cure but one that actually works

I remember thinking about how fortunate I was for having none of my family members to die from cancer. It was just another late night of working hard in the laboratory trying to find something. It was precisely 10 o’clock at night where I had never felt so accomplished. I had finally done it, I found the cure to cancer. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes when I had been reading the chart, but when I gave the antibodies to cancer patients their symptoms left and their cancer had been cured. I was 35 when I had found the cure and I lived in Iowa City, which is where I met my wife. I called my wife, Selena, and told her about my discovery and she started crying. It was a different type of cry..no it wasn’t tears from joy, it was tears from sadness. I asked Selena why she was crying. That day was never forgotten, not because of my discovery, but of the news that my wife told me. Our son passed away that afternoon from Lung Cancer. I was devastated. I went into a deep depression and I kept asking myself, “why couldn’t you have found the cancer just a couple hours earlier.” My story was all over the news, for awhile I never cared about anything but my son. I had received an extremely high number of money. I didn’t care about money anymore. I gave over half of it to people who needed it more than I did. I didn’t feel like doing interviews until about 6 months after his death. I learned something from my experience, In order to achieve your goal, sacrifices will need to be made. I found the cure to the most deadliest thing in the world but I had lost my most prized

Six years and then four months. First ALS then Glioblastoma. Rewind. A lot is missing. My story has partially been told already in this portfolio called "A Love Diagnoses." Continue. Since the time of the essay I have passed. October 17, 2016. You see, the time before I passed, I was in and out of hospitals. So much had gone wrong and doctors could not even pinpoint a cause or a solution. A hypothesis, the multiple drugs I had been on were causing my organs to fail and liquid to build up in my abdomen. These drugs, however, were showing progress of shrinking the tumor in my head. But they had to take me off the drugs because my body could not take it. Miserable. So miserable. My kids would visit me. While they were in the hospital room doctors

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

I can’t exactly say I remember it like it was yesterday. The only reason I won’t say that is because I can’t remember how I felt, if I felt anything at all. What I can say, is that I remember exactly how everyone around me felt. I’m not sure if it was the sufferance that made me numb, or if my brain is simply blocking out the immense sadness I must’ve felt at the time. Either way, it all started the beginning of April in 2012. When my mother first told me that we were going to drive to Canada because of a family emergency, I’m sure I must’ve felt shocked at the news; my mom usually hates when I miss school, especially that late into the year, but I obliged. I didn’t have a choice really, so my mom sat me down to tell me what exactly the family emergency was. Turns out my aunt Cristy had cancer, stomach cancer. I looked it up later that day, still slightly confused, as stomach cancer is rare. I slowly began to understand things, whatever it might mean to understand cancer anyway. My aunt had a very rare stomach cancer. We were driving 16 hours to Canada to see my cancerous aunt.

After a while of sitting in my grandparents living room mindlessly playing with my toys I decided to get up. I walked towards the commotion going on in the small hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen. The gathering of people consisted of my mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma. Curious about what was going on I walked over to the group. I reached my mom and looked up to see that her eyes were bloodshot, as if she had been crying. I looked over to my dad and his face, like everyone else's, was grim. During this time I kept hearing one repeating word, cancer. I started to listen more closely to the conversation going on around me because even at the age of seven I knew that cancer was bad news. I listened intently and heard my mom explain how she had colon cancer.

One experience that truly shaped the person that I am today is my Father’s on going battle with cancer. Over the course of 3 months the tumor had grown from the size of a dime to the size of a small orange in his neck. My Father had then gotten surgery to remove the stage 4 cancerous tumor. After finding out the cancer spread to the other side of his neck, he underwent another surgery. This has all taken place from June through September 2017. He is currently recovering from the second surgery and preparing for Chemotherapy. The situation in which I was forced into has had many positive impacts on me as a person and continues to as it progresses. After being forced into the situation I have changed very much as a person and a student. Having

When I turned 11-years-old my whole childhood began to change my life went from being perfect to everything but perfect. One day I came home to hear the news my father, my best friend; my hero was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Not knowing the struggle my family was about to take on I just began to cry. I had a million things running through my head what’s going to happen? Will everything be okay? Why him? What is going to happen? With all these things rushing through my head all I could do was cry not knowing this was least worse to come.

The questions, the stupid freaking questions. “Do I tell him he can’t leave me I need him, do I tell him he has to fight this, or do I hold his hand and tell him it is ok, we will be ok, and he can rest now?” As I barged through those doors and into that room, that very same room where three years before I had told him he had to make it, everything and everyone was a blur. All of those questions went away in an instant. When I saw his face with tears rolling down it a huge part of me died. I have seen him whine, I have seen him on different machines, I have seen him on life support, and I have seen him in this very same ICU room multiple times, but I have never seen him cry. I knew this time was so different. “Only two at a time, and the child can’t be in here.” I wanted to smack that nurse. “Did she not realize that he is dying and that this may be the last time my child and I will see

I wrote about the day my father was diagnosed with cancer. I said that we found out that my father had stage four brain cancer on July 5, 2014. The doctor at KU Medical Center said that he a tumour the size of a peanut on the right side of his brain. The doctor sent us to a neurosurgeon who said that he is going to take it out in a week. He removed the tumor and my father had 24 staples in his head. The rest of the year went fine, until the tumor came back in an inoperable spot. The cancer tumor came back right next to my father’s spinal cord and it grew to the size of a walnut. The neurosurgeon said he recommends him to take chemotherapy and receive treatment every so often. The chemotherapy was strong and it took a long time to do the treatments. We did treatments every week until about July of last year. The tumor was refusing to be any smaller and it wasn’t changing. They ended up taking my father off chemotherapy and they told him that he had 6 months to live. I then talked about all of the activities we did when we found this out. My aunt came up and we had pictures with my father. Then on January 20th of this year my father passed away. He passed away due to the brain cancer. I then ended the essay telling my most favorite memories that I had with my

My twins, Grace and Hope, were born in November 2011. Despite having a full and busy home life, I was still committed to pursuing medicine and elected to participate in the extended curriculum five-year program after returning to school in the summer of 2012. During that time the twins were nursing, did not sleep at night, had never attended daycare and refused to drink from a bottle. My eldest son, Joshua, was almost five years old and preparing for kindergarten, while my younger son, Caleb, was three and excited to enter pre-school. The past few years have been challenging as I have tried to balance my responsibilities as wife, mother and student; find time to study after helping with the children’s homework, go to countless doctor’s visits, help with classroom parties or field trips, juggle around school vacations, cheer during swimming or soccer, cook, clean,

At the young age of four, I had absolutely no concept of death, it was would take a year and several friend’s passing, before I would start to understand. It was then that the little, rambunctious Caroline became my hospital roommate. We quickly bonded and were inseparable, causing chaos throughout the hospital: Using our IV poles as scooters, racing down the halls, and using our outdoor voices in the halls. I didn’t handle the chemo as well as Caroline did and was in the hospital far more often than she was. We were diagnosed a few weeks apart and were on the same protocol, although we had different doctors. Caroline liked her doctor and I absolutely adored mine. It was my doctor Zipf, after all, who first inspired me to be a Pediatric Oncologist in the first place. I would copy everything he did and take note of all the words and phrases he used so that I too could speak like he did. After starting school, I realized that I truly loved learning, especially scientific topics, and I was even more certain that I wanted to go into the medical field. However, Caroline would lose her fight with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) on a peaceful, cool spring day when the two of us were still in junior high school, despite our circumstances being the same at the time of diagnosis. It has been many years since then but my desire to work in the medical field has remained the same as when I was just a four-year-old girl who simply