My Mother, My Hero

Everyone who is lucky enough to have a mother knows how truly special they are.  When you have a problem and you need advice, you call your mother.  When you are sad for any reason, you call your mother.  There is no one else in the entire universe that can replace your own mother.  I am fortunate enough to still have my Mom in my life and one thing I would love to do is to share with others how extraordinary she really is.

Four years ago, at the age of 25, I was diagnosed with breast cancer while I was in graduate school for occupational therapy.  To say the very least, I was floored.  I did what I had to do to treat it while still attending school and living my life with as much normalcy as possible.  I was living at home at the time since I had resigned from working and I had my mother, Louise, with me every step of the way.  To say she was a warrior would be an understatement.  Since she could not make my cancer go away no matter how much she tried, she made sure I was taken care of in every other way possible.  To make a tremendously long story short, I will mention just a few ways my mother graced me with her presence.  I will start first with the surgeries.  I had to undergo five of them before my reoccurrence and another two more after the metasasis to many areas of my bones, such as my skull, spine, ribs, sternum, shoulders, and pelvis.  However, I never did it alone because my Mom was by my side for every single one of them.  She put her full time job on the line to drive me all the way into Manhattan and back to Long Island again just to be there for me.  When I say that she gets lost in our own hometown, I am not lying!  For her the drive through the city to bring me to the hospital was a tremendous accomplishment for her.

Besides constantly being by my bedside for surgeries, CT Scans, bone scans, MRI's, and admittance into the hospital for reasons of pain or illness, my mother has continued to escort me to all of my chemotherapy treatments every week for the last three and a half years!  She has yet to put herself before me and she does all of this while being sick herself.  My mother suffers from high blood pressure as well as diabetes.  She is under constant medical care and takes a large amount of medication on a daily basis.  I have seen her experience many sugar highs as well as lows, but she will never miss a beat when it comes to me.  Through times of being unable to drive, do laundry, cook, shop for groceries, or eat for that matter for almost a year, my Mom has gone to the ends of the earth with the will of her own and I want to commend her forever.

Thank you Mom.

Story By: Christine Sansone, Breast Cancer Survivor