How Cancer Changed My Life

Cancer. It's a big ugly word that we hear more and more often as time progresses. We hear cancer and think of chemo and radiation, losing hair and nausea. We think about the effect of cancer on the person fighting it, forgetting about how it affects those that surround that person. When I was 31, my mom was diagnosed with esophageal/stomach cancer. Thankfully, they caught it early and she never had to go through chemo or radiation. Still, her having cancer completely changed my life. Not necessarily negatively, just changed.

My mom and I are close. Very close. She is my best friend. When we found out that she had cancer, it was one of the scariest things in my life. It forced us to have those hard conversations. What kind of funeral did she want? How did she want me to take care of her belongings? Was there anything specific she wanted to go to anyone specific? Then there were the pressing matters. When was her next doctor's appointment? Who with? My mom is an amazing woman and faced all of this new and scary situation with grace, poise, and strength. I, on the other had, was an absolute mess. I tried the best I could to put on a strong face for her, but I'm not sure that I ever really succeeded.

When we first found out, it was doctor visit after doctor visit. My grandmother had just died and my mom was the executor of her estate. Now she had yet another thing to plan and do paperwork for. Still, it never got her down. It was just another thing for her to do. My dad and I both did what we could to help out; driving her to doctor appointments, even going in with her so there was another pair of ears in an attempt to make sure there were no misunderstandings.

My mom’s cancer was at the junction of her esophagus and her stomach. This is rare. Usually cancer is in one or the other. This means that my mom had to have two separate surgeons, one for the stomach and one for the esophagus. These two surgeons were required to work in tandem, and when she went in for surgery, both of them operated together. One of the doctors dealt with removing a part of her esophagus, the other dealt with removing part of her stomach.

Surgery was the easy part, though. The hard part was recovery. My mom loves to drink water. I mean she loves to drink water and for a week after the surgery, she couldn’t drink. At first, they allowed her to wet her mouth with a sponge, that is until they realized she was sucking on the sponge and then dipping it in a cup of water to suck on it again. She was miserable. She wanted to go home. When she was finally able to come home, she had an external drain and a feeding tube with a feeding tube pump and canned nutrition. When she first came home we had a visit from an in home nurse who ended up being a bigger harm than help, and we ended up going back to the emergency room in order to get my mom’s tube cleared. Over the next few weeks, my father and I did our best to keep my mom fed, even though she hated the machine, hated that she could no longer sleep laying down, and never wanted to eat because it always made her sick. Everything went through that tube; nutrition and medication. We had to get special formulations of her medication so that she wouldn’t be without, and she needed to use children’s Tylenol, which we administered faithfully. During this period of time, my mom lost 45 pounds. I am thankful that she was slightly overweight at the beginning of all of this because by the end, she was underweight.

Eventually, we finally got the feeding tube removed. My mom’s eating habits improved. She has gained some of her weight back and is now a healthy weight. My mom still has trouble eating and doesn’t enjoy it, which has taken some getting used to, as I was raised in a family that built socialization around food. Since then, my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo radiation although, thankfully, she was spared chemo. Now they are thinking that my mom may have another kind of cancer. So we may be facing all of this again in the near future.

Still, the title of this post is about how cancer changed my life. I didn’t face the horrible effects of chemo. I didn’t have cancer myself. I have been very fortunate. My mom’s cancer was caught early. Despite all that, cancer has changed me. Now I have faced my mom’s mortality. Now we joke about her will. Now I respect her more than I ever have before. Now I see her differently. Now I have faced the unthinkable. Now I worry about getting cancer myself. Now I have had my first (early) mammogram. Cancer has changed my now. Cancer has changed my future. Cancer has altered the fabric of my relationship with my mother. I value the time we have together and I cherish every moment that I get to spend with her. I live with my parents right now while I finish school and I am so thankful that I have the ability to go in and check on her whenever I want. I value that she is there. I am more aware, more cognizant. Cancer has made me better.