If you are like most Americans, you either know someone who has cancer or you are fighting this horrible disease yourself. The other reality for most Americans is that you have lost someone special to you to cancer. I now fall in to both categories: fighting skin cancer, my Dad has fought skin cancer, and I lost my Mom to breast cancer in October 2003.
When my Mom was first diagnosed I was already living in North Carolina and was not with her in Tennessee as she battled breast cancer and shortly after her diagnosis I transferred to Washington state. I missed most of her first fight and the little victory of being declared cancer free. I transferred back to NC in 2001 and over the course of 2 years went home too few times. In the summer of 2003 she started feeling bad again...but her doctors told her she just had a summer cold. Well the summer cold turned into a full blown relapse of cancer...this time not only breast but in her lungs....only no one knew it until it was too late. The last time I saw her alive was labor day weekend when we had gone camping at a state park near my childhood home and stopped by the house for 30 minutes or so on our way back to NC. By the end of September she had been rushed to Nashville, TN and had several test that revealed the return of cancer I wrote of earlier. On October 13, 2003 while on my way to my son's baseball practice my phone rang...it was my Aunt (Mom's youngest sister) informing me that Mom had left us.
Mom was 61 at the time...way to young to have lost a battle with cancer. There is not a day that goes by that I don't miss her!!
So, why do I hate cancer....cancer took my Mom way to young, it has inflicted its curse on my Dad, and now I am dealing with it.....Enough said!
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