Personal Narrative: Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the time I entered the room, my world collapsed. My mother was lying on the bed and crying after the surgery. I was only 10 years old but I knew what cancer means. So overwhelmed by my fear and unrest, I lost hope for my life: how can a ten-year-old boy live without his mom?

A saying i've kept to myself is to get back up when knocked down. This saying doesn’t just stand for getting up when literally knocked down but can keep a deeper meaning than what it says as for example being knocked down by a difficult obstacle to overcome and getting up to find a way to get past it and achieving it. Some people may not see this as something important but they don’t think about how getting up after knocked down can be something that can or would have been like a positive outcome into their life and how they are given two choices when knocked down which is to stay down or get back up and continue going forward.

For two more weeks I remained in the hospital. Three times every day a nurse brought me a tray with a meal and medication. She watched as I swallowed the tablets, but never as I ate the meal. Compared to a normal sized portion of food, what I was given in hospital would be considered small, but my stomach was far too used to rations beyond small. Most days I was able to eat almost half a plate of pasta before my stomach rebelled and decided to throw it all back up again.

I am an enslaved African American bought by an army surgeon. My owner’s name is John Emerson. Emerson bought me in Missouri, but took me and his family with him to an army base in Illinois. Illinois is above the North latitude 36 degrees 30’N, so it is a free state. We did not stay very long in Illinois because Emerson was called to Wisconsin Territory which is also a free slave state. I can’t believe that I have been in TWO free states, yet I am still be counted as a slave. Once Emerson was done in Wisconsin he packed up his family and me, and went back to Missouri. Soon after we returned Emerson passed away. Emerson was a loyal owner. Since I am property of Emerson and he is now deceased what am I? Free? Still a slave? So back in 1846, I sued for my freedom from Emerson’s wife-Irene.

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

It was a typical day in the McDougal household; my sister was acclimating to college life, my annoying little brother was pushing my buttons, and my only worry was whether I was going to pass my next bio test. My dad was getting ready for a business trip to Singapore but decided to stop by the doctors for a quick checkup for his abdomen. Scans came back showing that the bump on his belly button was metastasized Stage IV Liver Cancer. I was completely devastated and couldn’t comprehend how my role model could have so much chaos inside of him. It took weeks before I could go a day without crying as I thought about my future without one of my biggest supporters. It seems for every glimmer of hope for a new treatment, a new, insurmountable brick wall appears when the scans show the treatment’s failure. As cliché as it sounds, every day truly is a rollercoaster; some days better than others. However, we slowly have adapted to this new reality and have truly understood that falling down is a part of life, but getting back up is living.

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.

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 body I had managed to jostle awake was a latecomer to Oeste the Stalerie had labeled Makenna. It was common for farmers to sell their female children to Oeste, the males were sold to Sur, on the night they were born and given a new name under the King. It was either the tower you sold your children to, or the death of not only your Daelocke child, but it meant your death as well. My own father was an impoverished horse farmer somewhere near the south. He, his wife and four children occupied a home somewhere distant from the island. They had supplied The King and his Stalarie their horses and livestock. I was told by the Sylphen that I was the last child born, and regrettably, born under the night of a full moon. He had sold me just three

Many people experience moments which help define them; for me, that defining moment came through loss. Nearly four years ago, my entire world was shaken to its very foundation from the death of my mother. After many tumultuous years, my mother lost her battle with breast cancer in 2012. Though coping with her death proved to be the most challenging obstacle I would ever face, it proved to also have a silver lining. Through my adversity, I have been introduced to a community of cancer families which have provided me with endless support during my times of struggle, and to whom I have been able to comfort in their own times of need.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the first thing that I thought was, I don’t have time for this. The doctor called me with the results of my previous test and attempting to stay calm I agreed to a time for an appointment and hung up the phone. I walk into the living room and sit on the couch in shock. Everything feels so surreal, this can't be happening to me. Sure I hadn’t been feeling the best but seriously? What am I going to do? What about Aleshia? My mind goes into a spiral of never ending thoughts. Slowly they calm and I walk into my five year old daughters room. There she sleeps; so peaceful and still. I lay beside her running my thin fingers through her curly hair. A tear silently runs down my cheek as I drift into sleep. The

Yelling from the top of my lungs at the bottom of the staircase, demanding breakfast and the control to turn on my favorite morning cartoon, everything seemed to be normal. However, the world as I once knew it quickly took a turn for the worse. You see, being the youngest of five, I quickly learned that a quiet house isn’t a normal house. Therefore, as I huffed and puffed up the stairs, snarling because everyone was still nestled in their beds, something quickly caught my eye. My brother, Craig was on the floor rolling back and forth in agonizing pain, he was barely able to make a call for help. Suddenly, my parents were awakened from my screaming and they quickly called 9-1-1. Seconds turned into minutes, minutes turned into hours, and hours turned into days. It seemed like my family was crumbling before my eyes. Suddenly, as I began to lose hope, I looked out of my bedroom window to see my dad carrying my brother in his arms up the driveway. My heart sunk into my stomach because I always saw my brother as a strong, self-sufficient teenager who never accepted help from anyone. Eager to know what happened, my parents sat my three older siblings and myself on the couch and told us the news: Craig has Cancer. Cancer. That’s all I heard. That one word had the ability to weaken the mold that once held my family together for so many years. My family became frantic and then gradually we began to forget how

On October fifteenth, 2003, my parents received a call from the hospital confirming my diagnoses, which would prove to be a forever life changing experience. On this day however, I thought it to be a special occasion and I was even excited, as I had not received the full information. My dad had deceived

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have, in my professional life, relied on others to do tasks that I did not have the skill sets for, instead of learning how to do them myself. I saw this as delegating. Now that I do not have the means to pay skilled people to do those tasks; I am horribly under qualified to work for other businesses. I made a professional decision to step back and go back to school, to learn these skills; as well as, a personal decision to take lower level courses to brush up on the basics. Although, I could easily let someone else do the work for me and I would have a piece of paper saying I have the skills to do the work; I would struggle and not be successful.

Six years and two months, that was the amount of time it had been since my father was officially diagnosed cancer free. What should have been a joyous occasion had instead become a fight for life. Radiation had damaged most of the muscles in his throat and the one hundred, or so, scopes that had been done had introduced drug resistant viruses into his system. Each year a simple cold would knock him out of commission for weeks, however the year 2010 was different. Common colds became pneumonia and pneumonia meant extended hospital stays. With each stay his body deteriorated more and more. As I sat in the cold stark room of Penn University Hospital I could barley recognize the man in the bed. He was rail thin with pale white skin and virtually no muscle mass at all. I noticed the covers had fallen down off of his body and so I went to pull them up being extremely careful not to disrupt the tracheostomy tube. My body and my mind were exhausted so I decided it was time to head home.