Cancer is a big issue. Some cancers have their treatment already figured out, where some cancers don’t even have a cure. I will be sharing my moms' cancer story and how she dealt with it. I will also be talking about a wonderful support group that she was a huge part of and I hope to be a part of someday, and about a wonderful novel, I read. I wanted to know more about cancer so I took researching cancer into my own hands and I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I found out many things that I am going to share with you.  

What is Cancer?

Cancer can cause you to become very sick and ill. Cancer is a genetic disease that is caused by changes to the genes that control the way your cells function. When you have cancer it causes your cells to function incorrectly. Your cells are supposed to grow and when they get too old they are supposed to die, but when you have a change in your genes it causes cells to not die and new ones to grow when they are not wanted to cause cancer. The way cancer is spread is by a cancerous cell dividing up and feeding the tumor to make it grow bigger. 

Types of cancer

There are many different types of cancer. There are over 100 types of cancer, but some of the most common cancers are Skin cancer, Lung cancer, Kidney cancer, Bladder cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, thyroid cancer, pancreatic cancer, and Leukemia. There are also some rare types of cancer. One rare cancer is sarcoma. All these cancers have one thing in common, and that is that they are all caused by a genetic change. That genetic change could have been inherited from your parents. 

My Novel

My novel relates quite a bit to cancer. My favorite quote from my novel is  “I followed him inside. A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in cursive with the words Home is where the heart is, and the entire house turned out to be festooned in such observations. Good friends are hard to find and Impossible to forget read an illustration above the coat rack. True love is born from hard times promised a needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished living room. Gus saw me reading “My parents call them encouragements,” he explained. “They’re everywhere.”” This is my favorite quote because it shows that when you need something encouraging or something to put you in a good mood you can just look up and see the sayings.  The novel is The Fault in our Stars by John Green. The Fault in our Stars is about a girl named Hazel Grace, who has thyroid cancer. Her mother makes her go to a support group to talk about how she feels and to meet other people who have or have had cancer. Hazel met a boy named Augustus Waters. Augustus had osteosarcoma. Augustus and Hazel had a very good connection as friends but then it slowly became more. Shortly after Hazel and Gus met they traded books. After Gus had finished reading An Imperial Affliction he wanted to figure out what happened. Hazel e-mailed the author of An Imperial Affliction and his assistant replied to her. When Van Houten's assistant replied she invited her and Gus to go to Amsterdam to meet the author. Hazel wanted to go so bad but she had already used her dying wish to go to Disney. Gus still had his wish, but Hazel didn’t know. Gus decided to use his dying wish to go to Amsterdam. Hazel and Gus got to go see Van Houten, but he was nothing but a nasty snob. Due to Van Houten being a snob Hazel and Gus left and Van Houten fired his assistant. So Hazel, Gus, and Van Houten’s assistant went to the Anne Frank house. After a bad day and a good day, the day ended on a bad note. Gus had told Hazel that his cancer was back and it was all over his body and not just in his leg. A couple of months later Gus died because his cancer had gotten too bad to handle anymore. I can relate to The Fault in our Stars. My mom had Leiomyosarcoma and passed away due to her cancer getting too bad for her to deal with it.

My Story

           When I was 11, my Mom was diagnosed with stage 2 Leiomyosarcoma. I vividly remember the day she told me and my brothers that she had cancer. My Mom and Dad were both home when I got home from school, which was unusual. I was working on my homework and then my dad came and got me and said you need to go to the living room. My Dad then came back out with little baskets with a stuffed animals and journals. My Mom then told us that she had cancer and that she would have to get treatment for it. All of us burst into tears because we didn’t know what was going to happen. She had gotten it treated but then in 2016, her cancer relapsed. My mom was then having to deal with weekly routines of going down to Boston to get Chemo-therapy. Every month she would have a CT scan to see if her cancer had spread to any other parts of her body. Almost every time my Mom came home from her CT scans she would say “The doctor said the scans look good,” but the truth is she didn’t want to tell us how bad her cancer was. Most times she was telling the truth, but when her cancer had gotten worse she had started to lie about how bad her cancer was. She had finally told me and my brothers about two weeks before June 11th, 2019 that “I just got a call from the doctor and he said there is nothing else we can do for me.” My brothers and I were devastated. On June 11th, 2019 my mother passed away at 11:43 am to stage 4 leiomyosarcoma that was in her lungs and back. I remember as if it were yesterday. My mom was admitted to the ICU on Monday, June 9th, 2019. Only one of my moms' lungs was able to function because in my mom's right lung there was a tumor blocking her lung from working. So she was put on a c-pap. On June 11th my Memere got a call from the doctor at 2:30 saying to bring me and my brothers into the hospital to see her because he didn’t know how much longer she had to live. We got to the hospital around 3:30 and went in to see my mom. She wasn’t strong enough to do anything herself. All she wanted to do was get up and talk and hug me and my brothers. The doctors had taken her off her c-pap and put a nasal cannula on her so she could talk to me and my brothers. But shortly after she was put on the nasal cannula she fell asleep and was struggling to breathe. A lot of my family went to the hospital to see my mom. After she had passed she was white like a ghost and cold. I couldn’t believe my mother was gone. I couldn’t handle it every time I looked at her I felt sick to my stomach. But one thing my mom wanted to do was to donate all the organs she could to help other people in need of organs. The only thing that she could donate were her corneas. Someone was lucky enough to receive my moms' corneas and was able to see for the first time in their life. At my mom's wake and funeral we had a special coin that said that my mom was an organ donor. My youngest brother gave a little speech about how much my mom meant to him and how much my mom cared about other people. One thing everyone will remember about my mom is that she was a fighter and she didn’t give up on anyone even when days were rough.

The Sunflower Brigade

After my mom had been going to Boston for a while, she decided to bring my  brothers and I to Boston with her. The first time we had ever gone to Boston we met a wonderful lady who was the founder of a support group that was called the Sunflower Brigade. After my mom heard about the Sunflower Brigade she immediately joined. After my mom had joined she met so many more people have had, have, or have a family member that has some type of Sarcoma. In the Sunflower Brigade there are close to 2,000 people in the worldwide group and in the local Sunflower Brigade there are about 200 people. The founder of the Sunflower Brigade is a cancer patient herself. Her cancer story is a lot like my mom's, but she is still fighting. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, everyone needs to know not only what cancer is but what it can do to you. People are always trying to find a new chemotherapy that will help to cure cancer. Almost everyone's cancer story is different you will rarely find someone that has almost the same exact cancer story as you. In everyday life you will most likely run into a person that has or has had cancer and you don’t even know what is going on with them. If anyone ever wants to be a part of trying to cure cancer but you don’t want to become a doctor you can always just donate to a research project for trying to find a cure for cancer.