Losing A Mother To Breast Cancer: A Case Study

During middle school, I had to mature very quickly. My parents got divorced when I was 12 years old. When they first told me the news, I was devastated. I had always thought my parents would be together forever. I started crying because I didn’t know what else to do. My other siblings were too young to understand what was happening. While they were working things out, my parents would leave us home alone. I realized I had to step it up, and take care of my siblings. This moment was very important in my life because it made me grow up at a very young

I was born very early and had teenage parents who did not really have their life together at that time. My parents were both high school dropouts. My dad dropped out because school was not for him and he just wanted to work and get money and my mom dropped out because school was not for her also and she was pregnant with me and did not want to deal with school. My dad worked everyday to keep our family moving and my mom just stayed at my grandmas house with me because obviously she had to take care of me. So we were living by paycheck to paycheck. One year later my sister was born and two years later after that my other sister was born. Since my parents really did not have that much money to get our own place we would live at my grandmas house to my papa’s house but at times we would have to camp out at the beach because we had no other choice. When we would live at the beach I would think that we were just camping for fun but I did not realize that we did not have any place to stay. My parents clothed me and my sisters, provided food for us, but we did not have a house over our head. So

After such an opportunity and my mom’s illness, I look back on this time and realize that it was then that I truly stopped being a child. Early on in my high school academic career I lacked the maturity and work ethic to be the best student I could be. Our family’s situation caused me to grow up overnight. I am grateful for the lessons I was able to learn at such a young age. Beyond the independence, courage and empathy which I developed during this time, I have learned to enjoy and value my life. I am thankful for each blessing and I work hard with these things in

Being raised by a single father was hard, especially since I was oldest child and only girl. My mother left when I was three years old. This left me with a lot of responsibility. I had to grow up fast.

I began to help my mom around the house. I had to learn how to cook a proper meal when I was seven years old, do laundry among other things to give my mom some relief. One day, when I was nine years old, my grandmother shared the news of my father’s departure to the U.S and that he did so to give me a better chance. It was heavy news for me, and as an emotional child I cried with my grandma and felt sad that from now on I was not going to get the occasional visit from him. As a teenager in the process of growing into a man, you think you need a father figure, a man perspective, advice on things that life throw at you, it was clear that I didn’t have that anymore. I was fortunate to have my mother and my grandmother to teach me right and wrong; the rest was pretty much up to me.

My mother and father were absent during my younger years. Once I turned 6 I realized my mind was at the age of an 11 year old. I had to learn to take care of myself and my siblings without the help of others. I had become mature because of the absence of my mother and father. I swore to never be like my mother; She was not only absent, but she made decisions that I would never make.

A year ago today I lost the woman I called mom to cancer. Most days I still have trouble believing she's really gone. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't think about calling her and telling her about my day and realizing that I can't. There are days when all I can think about are how I won't get to have her at my wedding or how she'll never meet my kids. Days I feel lost and I mourn the memories we never made or the things I never got to tell her, days where I wonder if she would be proud of the woman I have become. I often dwell on all that could've been but never will be and today is definitely one of those days. But I do cherish the moments and memories we did get together. My mom was one of the best people I knew. She always put

The Breast Cancer Decision Aid was tested in a convenience sample of 51, age, riskappropriate

When I was four years old, my mother and father got divorced, although he didn't live with us since I was two. At the time, my brother was only eight. Being a single parent is a hard enough job in itself but my mother also worked full time.

When Allison Ardolino Dinkelacker was 30 weeks pregnant with her first child in 2009, she found out that she had stage 3 breast cancer. Her son, Dylan, was born via an emergency c-section shortly thereafter so that she could begin treatment.

Breast cancer affects so many of us. Most of us will know someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. It may be our grandmothers, our aunts, our moms, our sisters, our best friends, our spouses, or ourselves. Breast cancer even strikes men. The likelihood is fairly high that we know someone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. The shocking statistic is that breast cancer occurs in 85% of us who have no history of breast cancer in our family. Despite medical advancements, early detection, and the pink ribbon campaign every October, breast cancer is still the 2nd leading cancer cause of death in women.

In September of 2011, Tami Cox Billings was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. She had a tumor that was larger than her heart. She went under intense chemotherapy. In April of 2012, she got a bilateral mastectomy with lymph nodes removed. She was still undergoing chemo and radiation for an additional 4-5 months. When she went to the doctor in October of 2013, for a checkup, the cancer was gone! Although Tami and her husband Kim’s euphoria was soon diminished. On Christmas Eve, Tami was getting ready for a shower, and found a new lump. A biopsy of the area was taken and the results were, metastatic breast cancer. Cancer was found in the central lymph nodes on her chest, in her right lung middle lobe, and along the right side of her

I can still remember vividly the day my mother passed away. My mother passed away at a critical point in my life when I was seventeen years old from a short term illness. She was sick for a week and I remember thinking this could be serious, however, my mother declined to go to the hospital because of the distance and financial hardship. I had loss my father when I was three years old, so my mother was a single mother. I have step sisters and brother, but I was not particularly close to them. Losing my mother was a defining moment in my life for it changed my life irrevocably. I was devastated, but I had to become strong, proactive and it spurred me to choose a new career path.

My parents took custody of my sister’s children, which then began the chaotic day-to-day home life that usually left me in tears by bedtime. I was in middle school at the time, as a middle school aged girl I felt a whirlwind of emotions. I wanted to do things that other kids my age were doing but that wasn’t always possible. With very mentally handicap children in our home it wasn’t easy to just invite a friend over to come spend the night, not only would my mom say no but also I was far too embarrassed. I wanted to go out and eat in a restaurant like I heard my friends talking about, but no, going out to eat with my sister’s children would be very difficult because they couldn’t sit still or refrain from making loud noises in public places. I wanted my mom to take my friend and I to the movies rather than always going with a friend and their mom, but my mom was always tied down to caring for my sister’s

In the beginning, I only knew the life of the spoiled baby in the family. Then five years down the road, came a nine pound bundle of sickness. As a baby my little brother Matthew was in and out of hospitals. The sickly baby was not the only thing my parents made, along with the baby came jealousy and competition. So from going to getting most of mom and dad’s attention, to getting virtually none, my life began to get pretty difficult as a five year old. Instead of spending the weekends at home with my family, I spent them wondering when I would get to see my mom and dad again. Getting bossed around by my older sister, Hannah and my older brother, Jacob, made me miss them even more. After seeing Matthew in the hospital I felt guilty for being jealous of all of the attention he was getting. But I was 5,and dumb. At this time, everything I knew about my family was changing. I had to learn to be a little more independent and at the same time be someone people could depend on.