Mom.

My mother is a poem I'll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother. ~Sharon Doubiago

The rest of that year was a blur to me. My mom had been having constant migraines, but she just wrote it off as stress. Then that December, my mother started feeling sick, and the migraines started to affect her vision. She went to the Dr. and they did an MRI/CATSCAN. They found a mass in her brain and her chest/breasts. They quickly biopsied the mass in her breast and they found cancer. In her lymph nodes. Everywhere. Again. She promised she would fight as hard as she could. They gave her 6 months.

Endless chemo and radiation treatments caused her long blonde hair to fall out. She didn’t care. She wore her favorite tye dye bandana and smiled at the people that passed by and stared unkindly at her. She never once felt sorry for herself. We were at a restaurant one night, and there was a group of people at a table eating. They thought it would be funny to start making fun of my mom, loud enough for them to hear her. It was awful. I was about to get up and tell them what I thought of it, but just before I did, my mom said not to. She said it would make me just as bad as them if I did that. She politely turned around and stuck her tongue out at them. It was hilarious.

That year for my 16 th birthday, she sent me to Disney World to eat dinner in Cinderella’s castle with my friends. I love Disney World. That was mine and my mother’s special place. It was the first time I had ever been without her. I cried several times that day.

At this point my mother had been admitted to the hospital in the ICU so that she could receive multiple treatments a day. I was sleeping on the floor of her room on an air mattress. Each day was an uphill battle. Some days were better than others. She had stopped eating because the cancer had continued to spread until it was in her stomach. It made her feel full all of the time so she was never hungry and when she did eat, she would vomit back up. One evening she stopped breathing. They had to connect her to a breathing tube. They said she wasn’t going to make it. I asked her if she was going to be ok and she gave me a thumbs up. She could still hear me talking to her, although the doctors assured me she could not. A few days later, she started to breathe again on her own. I thought she was getting better.

About a week after this, she stopped responding to everything. The doctors once again told me there was nothing that they could do. I still held out that things were going to turn around. She went to into a coma like state after a few days. About a week later in June of 2004, she passed away. It had been exactly 6 months since her diagnosis.....(more tomorrow)

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