Mom

The reason we started this project was that the disease finally hit home.

I had done the Susan Komen Race for the Cure with my family on several occasions, and it was always a great experience. I knew of several people who battled the disease, some who lost and some who won. When your mom tells you in passing ‘I have breast cancer,’ no matter how early they caught it, no matter the prognosis, it hits you a bit. And it hurts.

Many people say ‘know your body,’ ‘check for lumps,’ and so on. The message my mom has is ‘get your mammogram.’

Her diagnosis was so early that there was no way to physically tell she had anything wrong, the ‘specks’ that showed up on the screening were hardly visible, but they were cancer. After a very mild treatment (surgery and radiation) she was done.

She told us that she never really had the thought of ‘I’m going to die.’ And driving to treatments just became part of her day: get up, eat breakfast, go to radiation, go to work.

The biggest thoughts she has taken away from this battle are a concern since now there is a family history of breast cancer (where there once, was not) and a realization that although there are groups, and friends and family, this is still a very lonely disease. If sharing these stories somehow helps one person, we have made a small victory in the goal we set out to achieve.