Narrative Essay: My Life With Stage Two Breast Cancer

As the news hit me, I was very panicky. My mom then had told me that she was going to have to get surgery and that everything was going to be okay. As I believed that she could beat Breast Cancer, I could still hear the worry in my mom's voice.

It was an early saturday morning when my parents woke my sisters and I up. They said we all needed to come down stairs so they could talk to us. We were sitting at the kitchen table when my mom told us, she had been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. I remember crying for about an hour straight and i just kept thinking why? Out of all the people in the world why was it my mom, one of the most important people in my life. that was just the beginning she still had so much to go through. My mom had multiple surgeries some major and some minor, chemo and radiation. I remember when she came home from the first treatment she was weak and very tired. I was so scared for her.

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

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.

This time, my mother pulled me aside to tell me she too had developed cancer. However, this time was different. With all the new information on cancer, they had the ability to find my mother’s tumor before it progressed to a dangerous proportion like my grandmother’s tumor had. Diagnosed as stage 0, my mother’s treatment was straightforward, and I was not worried at all because I knew her cancer was treatable. This feeling of security I experienced was due to the research conducted by the thousands of scientists trying to discover a cure. My gratitude is owed to them.

An experience that has made a huge impact on who I am today is when my single mother was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer when I was a sophomore in high school. I was instantly heart broken and terrified I would lose the person that motivated me to do my best. My mom and I have encountered many obstacles together that have made us extremely close, but this was the biggest challenge yet. I gave up many opportunities to be home with my suffering mother. It was not the high school lifestyle I was expecting, but it turned out to form me into a whole new person in a positive way.

This experience transformed me. When the doctors found something weird in my breast, they told me I had breast cancer. From that moment forward, my life changed and I couldn’t grasp why this was happening to me. However, with the help of my family, friends, and my faith I was able to pull through.

In September of my junior year of high school, my mom told me for the third time that she had cancer. She had spent the entire summer coughing. It was a bad summer cold or maybe a stubborn case of bronchitis. No one could seem to figure out what was causing the cough. A late summer bronchoscopy finally solved the case. It was cancer. Calmly, she reassured me on that September day, “It’s an early stage cancer. They say it’s very treatable. We’ve been down this road before.” The next nine months was a road that no one in my family had traveled. Frequent doctor visits, chemotherapy treatments, and hospitalizations became our new normal. We painstakingly watched as each round of chemo treatments devastated and weakened her. Through everything, my mom was resilient, tough, and determined to live.

Have you ever felt so broken and lost that you believed you simply couldn’t keep going on in life, as if the barriers of your life caved in and suffocated the very existence in which you lived? This pain was all that I knew in the months following my grandfather’s loss to cancer in July of 2008. Fighting until his dying breath, it was a moment in my life that rocked and shattered my heart like fragile glass. His death required me to adapt to and appreciate life and showed me that no obstacle is to big overcome if you maintain hope and a positive outlook.

It’s astonishing how one diagnosis can completely alter the life of a family. One day you’re looking to move into the fancy houses along the coast, and the next you’re forced to consider if you would be able to afford the same home with one income. When I was three years old my mom was diagnosed with uterine cancer. I was too young to know what was happening, but at the age of seven, when my mom was diagnosed for the second time, I began to notice a change in my family’s daily life. I was told not to sit on my mom’s lap and that she could not play with me as much as usual due to her Chemotherapy, but it was not until her third time contracting cancer that I noticed the pain she was in. I was fourteen when I finally learned about the very thing I had been trying to figure out for nearly my entire life. This burden has solely shaped the way I act and how I handle life’s many challenges, but how it accomplished this was not always a joyous experience.

Everything in life can be associated with a color, happiness is a bright and inviting yellow, while sadness could be a dull and dismal grey. One afternoon, my twin brother, Chris, and I were sitting on the couch, smiling and laughing with one another. Vibrant shades of yellows and oranges surrounded us and made me feel safe and at ease. Our parents walked into the living room with somber looks on their faces, my mother looked upset. That was the day I found out my mother had been diagnosed with Breast Cancer. The Russell’s lifestyle was challenged now with a horrible plague my mother was burdened with. The prominent color present in the house went from a warm red to a darker shade, a color I associate with the threat of death. Something about that didn’t sit well with me.

One of the most difficult things I’ve ever experienced has been my battle with cancer. When I was 21 I was preparing to submit my mission papers. What was supposed to be a simple physical exam, turned into an unexpected battle. In October 31, 2013 my doctors diagnosed me with papillary cancer. I had surgery, and a couple weeks after had radiation treatment. Months later I was told I was cancer free, and I received my mission call. I was assigned to serve in the Colorado Denver South Mission. Unfortunately a week after I got my mission call, I was told that my cancer was back, and had actually spread to my lymph nodes; its next target would be my lungs, thus making my goal to serve a mission seem further from my reach. I went through the process

For my mom, the last six months has been a fierce battle against cancer which was discovered in her breast. First there was the mastectomy to remove the tumorous breast and then the chemotherapy

Im so shy to ask for help - but I’m writing to help fund my mom’s recovery of stage 4 breast cancer. She was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer and is now on a long road of battling.

Being a cancer survivor presents many persistent challenges. Despite those challenges, I graduated high school with honors. Hope for an uncertain future comes in part from the salvation I find in being a college student.