~ ♥ Through Lisa's Eyes ♥ ~

Yesterday my son Alec came up to me to show me an essay he wrote for one of his classes.  As I read his words, I had to fight back tears.  I knew he was deeply affected by the news of my skin cancers, but reading his words pierced through my heart.  My son went from a 4.0 GPA to a 2.78 GPA in two years.  Alec had ambitions of being a Neurosurgeon or a Cardiac surgeon.  Now, I am not sure what his ambitions are. 

Here is his essay:

Not many people may realize, but in every city, town, school there is a story to be told by the unknown faces we encounter in our daily lives. Our world is a virtual library of stories untold, hidden and kept in secret. When I look around my classroom, I don’t see faces or names; I see books that have yet to be read. Our lives are an unfolding library of stories that are being bound together to create a journey. Each person has a unique story to be told; the story of their life.

In my sixteen years of life, there’s a lot to be told. However, the memory that stands out to me, the one that I will never forget in my years of living, will be the day I found out my mother had cancer. I thought such a thing would never happen to me. Cancer is such a scary word when you first hear it. It floods your mind with images and things you’ve heard on T.V. It floods your brain with death and fear. At first, I didn’t know how to comprehend what my parents had just sat down and told my sisters and me; there was no way for me to collect my thoughts. I was left in the dark, not knowing what to feel, what to think. Then it hit me. Like the time I got in a car accident a few years back; first, you feel a jerking motion, then the confusion sets in and time seems to go slower. When it’s all over, you sit back for a moment, and realize you were just in a collision, and that’s when the panic strikes. For days, I went on without feeling any sign of panic from what I had just learned about my mother.  However, when it finally did hit me, it was as if someone had punched me in the gut, and my breath was stolen from me. Tears poured down my face uncontrollably; I sat there feeling useless. Fortunately, I was home in my room when it all happened. I can still remember feeling as if I lost control of every movement in my body.  All I could do was cry, all I wanted to do was cry. It seemed like an eternity as I sat there useless, not able to do anything but cry.

In the weeks following, I tried my best to gather the pieces of the broken puzzle into which my heart had transformed. It was the hardest thing to sit in class and force all my emotions into a glass bottle with the lid vacuum-sealed and hope that the bottle did not burst. To try and act as if everything in your life is fine, ordinary; to hide behind a mask glued to your face; to lie to my friends and say “I’m fine, really. Just tired is all” was a task that was constantly approached on a daily basis; it became more of a chore than a task.

Skin cancer may sound minor in comparison to the medical terms ‘brain tumor’ or ‘heart surgery’ but a new meaning is perceived when you put the word ‘melanoma’ in the phrase. The picture changed as I began researching. The horror that consumed me can only be described as a constant battle between worry and fear. Melanoma skin cancer is the deadliest and least treatable skin cancer when it is not caught early. Hours seemed as if they were minutes, while seconds seemed to cease. The images ate away at my brain and latched onto my thoughts, as well as my subconscious. It was like a parasite, invading my head, a parasite whose only purpose was to make my life as miserable as possible. There was absolutely no way for me to relax without any worrisome thoughts drifting around in the vast space of my mind. 

My mind is a place that is alien to anyone but me, a place where only I can find sanctuary, a place that I can find myself. However, this parasite intruded into my mind, and I lost my sanctuary, my safe house. My memory was left scarred from the day my parents informed me about the cancer. That memory is a scab, that once was an open wound that was left festering and infected my head with panic and terror. To this day, I am overcome by my emotions and, occasionally, I breakdown. My life is a story that is at its end of chapter sixteen, a story that has barley begun; a story that is scribed in pen. It is only one story that quietly shares the massive library that shelves the books of tens of millions of others.

 

If I’m diagnosed with my 3rd Melanoma and it’s worse than Stage 1A…how do I tell my children?  How the hell do I tell them?