My Mom Had Cancer: A Short Story

Have you ever had a scary moment where you think you or somebody else in your family might die? Well… I have and I never want it to happen again. This is my Mom’s story.

Everything is perfectly fine, everything is great, then one day it all comes crashing down and shattered pieces are left. My life would never be the same but I guess change is for the best and it forced me to become the person I am today. It’s rough to be the oldest child, especially when your mom is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and you have 3 younger sisters that look to you for comfort when their mom can’t be there. When the cancer is spread throughout your moms body doctors can’t just get rid of it no matter how badly you wish they could. Rounds of chemotherapy only slow it down, yet it’s still there a lurking monster waiting to reappear at any given moment. Nothing can even begin to describe the fear I felt, and still have to deal

Sun of Happiness At the age of eleven, I thought the world was full of candy and rainbows. But then, a big event happened in my life. It is a moment that will never be forgotten. As the event is full of burden in a despondent way, I realized but bad things will and can come your way, but you have to remain positive.

I would stay alert all night sometimes. Every gust of wind or howl of our neighborhood dogs would send shivers through my spine. Throughout the nights I could hear whispers. I could never make out words except for this night. (I was half asleep when) I heard it say “Let me out” I opened my eyes and I was in front of the basement door. BANG. “LET ME OUT!” I got up and ran to my room locking the door behind me. I was breathing heavy by the time I got to my room. Looking at my hands, I realized they were covered in salt. There had been salt surrounding the door to the basement.(I had never realized that there was salt that surrounded the door.)After that The month slowly passed by without even a sound from her. People prepared for upcoming Halloween. Pumpkins were carved and set out in the front of people’s houses as people prepared for this week, Halloween. A loud bang i heard chains fall against the stairs along with soft foot steps ( I brought a flashlight to talk to her then her I could see her cold black eye through the

    “Ew, no.” she said.     “Then follow me and quit We were walking for a few hours. My feet throbbed and my ears were ringing from Taylor’s whining. Finally I could see it, the old abandoned house I discovered one day while riding my bike. The door was barely hanging onto its hinges, and there were several windows missing or broken. I pried open the splintering oak door. In the house there was two rooms. One, the one you first enter, was most likely a kitchen and living room. There was a sofa with faded fabric and springs popping out everywhere. An old furnace sat in the corner with rotting charcoal inside. The door of the furnace was missing rendering the whole thing useless. The other room was much smaller. It was a bedroom. There was a twin sized bed. The frame was rusty and missing a leg. I pulled the mattress off of it, so we could sleep on it. There were springs and stuffing sticking out of the mattress. It wasn’t too dirty to sleep on because I pulled off the moldy sheets. We laid down on the mattress. Taylor started snoring within minutes. I was worried about Mom. She had had a seizure before. It was because of her failing liver. Last time, social services took me and my sisters to a girl’s home. They served cooked vegetables that smelled like rotten seafood and chicken noodle soup with frozen chicken. After Mom got out of the hospital she got custody of us, but the judge told her if it happened again she wouldn’t get us back. My older sister, Becca, was eighteen so she didn’t have to

A Typical Diaz Night I heard the click of the lock and my mom pushed the door open. We were greeted with an excited Coco. Her tail would wag furiously from left to right, making a thumping noise against the furniture and shakes her entire body in the process. My shoulders relax, and I did not realize how good it feels to be home. My brother pushes past me. The stench coming from his dirty and ripped up football jersey made my nose wrinkle. He rushes ahead to take a shower before dinner. That’s when a familiar smell hits me. A growling noise came from deep inside my stomach, wanting to be fed after a long tiring Thursday at school.

I really enjoyed how this article was written because it was Patricia Falls, the writer of the article, cancer experience. I personally thought it made the article easier to read because she's writing from an experience and she doesn't feel the need to use medical terms that the general public would not be able to understand. This article was very directed towards people in general who are not old enough to start going for testing. For example, there is an age at which women start to get screened for breast cancer. I thought this article was very differently from the other cancer newspaper articles I have read because it talked not about cancer victims but patients who are at a high risk of developing cancer in the future. She mentioned a

It had been two and a half years since my initial diagnosis of stage 3 Breast Cancer. For the first few months after my diagnosis, I possessed some optimism despite the odds not being in my favour. I would often be a victim of pitiful looks and glances that conveyed, “I am so sorry for you.”, “Your days are numbered, sweetheart.” and “You are fighting a lost battle.” “Fighting a lost battle?” I would mutter in my mind. Ah nevah loss in meh life and ah sure ah not going tuh start now. Ah doh wah people remember meh as the woman who had breast cancer instead ah want to be remembered fuh all meh achievements and the good things ah do in meh life. Ah doh wah meh neighbours to say, “Yuh remember Elizabeth Jacob, she was one pretty woman, but now,

Being diagnosed with cancer I knew I only had one option and that was to take it to the Lord and when I did, wow! He not only healed me He delivered me too of addictions! I repented of my sins to Jesus with my whole heart and He healed me! Not instantly it was a process for months, everything except drinking and smoking that He did

On a chilly Saturday afternoon around the end February, I arrived home from my grandparents only to find that my great aunt, who lives in Washington State, had taken my great grandmother to the emergency room because she couldn't walk. My aunt was up here visiting at the time. My great grandmother was in the local hospital for a few days before they shipped her to Maine Medical Center in Portland, where they proceeded to diagnose her with breast cancer and lymphoma. The breast cancer had a tumor that was against her spine, so she couldn't walk. This was her third time being diagnosed with cancer. The round that did her in.

The summer of 2015 brought many memorable events for me including celebrating my sweet sixteenth birthday and passing my drivers test. However, my mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer and her journey fighting that awful disease was the event that most marked my transition from childhood to adulthood. I have a very close knit family and before my mother’s diagnosis, everyone had been very healthy. I guess I took a lot for granted including my family’s health, and I didn’t realize or consider what really was important in life. Prior to my mother’s illness I was a typical self centered teenager, not really concerned with anyone else but myself. I had always seen my mother, a full-time nurse, as a strong person who took good care of herself and her family. When I first learned that my healthy 48 year old mom had breast cancer, I was so scared. The thought of losing my mom made me feel very vulnerable. However, I soon found an inner strength and courage that I never knew I was capable of possessing.

“Yeah?” She Mom would be home soon and I was getting kind of bored. I broke through the gaggle of girls barking at Krista, said a quick goodbye and started home. Luckily for me, Krista’s house was only 5 or 10 minutes away from mine. Unluckily for me, I didn’t bring a coat, so I had to trek into the frigid, biting wind that nipped at my body the entire time home. As soon as I reached my house my body was wrapped in a blanket of warmth, the familiar smell of waffles and syrup greeting my nose. Since my mom wouldn’t be home for another hour or so, I didn’t try to sneak back in. Yet to my surprise, as I stomped upstairs I heard a voice coming from her room. It’s probably just Ally on the phone or something, I reassured myself. When I passed by my mom’s room, it wasn’t Ally standing there, it was my mom pacing the room with a worried expression on her face. Something I’ve never seen

“Shut the door quickly,” I said. “I know,” she replied with a slight edge in her voice. I woke up at 3 am, sweltering, frustrated, and A shadow of light cast itself across the room illuminating my sister who lay next to me in bed. She had pushed all the blankets on my side, sprawled her legs across the entire king size bed, and rested her head on my pillow, so close to me that I could taste the putrid odor on her breath. I glared at her. As stealthily as I could, I slipped off the blankets and got out of bed. The thermostat read 78 degrees. I pressed the snowflake button ten times so the thermostat read 68 degrees: the perfect sleeping temperature. Each time I pressed the button a high pitched beep filled the void in the silent room, echoing off of each of the walls. My sister's eyes flew open on the tenth beep. She sat upright and looked at me with an immense anger. Then she screamed. Before she could finish yelling my name, my parents were awake and out of bed, running over to her in alarm. “She tried to turn down the heat,” my sister shrieked through her heavy sobs. She started flailing around, rolling in the sheets and punching the mattress. I made a beeline for the bathroom, where I had hid three hours earlier when she had the exact same melt down. Through the

In 2009, my grandmother had breast cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and all sorts of cancer treatments and was then told that her cancer had gone in remission. 3 years later, she started losing appetite and felt bloated all the time. She lost so much weight that I hardly recognized her. Aunt sent her for more scans, and turned out her cancer recurred. Aunt was the one who got her results. After a family discussion (without grandma), the decision was to not let grandma know it was cancer, but just an ordinary indigestion. Everyone was told to not even mention a word about ‘cancer’. Obviously, grandma did not receive treatments a normal cancer patient would receive, instead, she was told to practice ‘Qi Gong’ – a Chinese meditation which is believed to have healing effect. 6 months after her cancer recurrence, she passed away.

Imagine, if you will, a brisk night wind coming fast across a lake carrying a pungent smell, something you can’t quite identify, but is nonetheless familiar enough to send a shiver up your spine. As it hits the trees, they creak out a somber call in the still night air. Or was that groan something more…human? You notice, for the first time, the absence of tires humming on pavement and you wonder if it’s that late, or maybe just a slow night. The soft tapping of your shoes on the sidewalk is the only accompaniment your slow breathing has as you move towards the warmth of your home, holding thoughts of a warm bed in the palm of your hand to keep the chill away. You don’t notice at first, perhaps because the reality of what you’re hearing is