Personal Narrative: Diagnosing With Cancer

“We can’t go out tonight. I already told you that.” Cali told her best friend Caleb now very annoyed.

There is nothing anyone could have done. My sister didn’t mean to get cancer, and she couldn’t have stopped it from growing. I just wish things had happened differently and that my entire family wouldn’t be turned away from me now.

Hello everyone from the Jeanne E. Shader Endowed Scholarship foundation I just wanted to say thank you so much for investing in my education this means so much me because I am putting myself through school and it is a lot harder than I imagined and I never thought that I would have too. During my senior year of high school my dad left and took a lot of furniture from the house and all the money in the shared bank account that he and my mother shared. A few months after all this happened my mom started to get sick every night to the point I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about her one night it was storming really bad and my mom walked in my room and asked me to take her to the hospital I was terrified because my mom avoids the doctors usually so I knew something had to be wrong it was also a day after

Have you ever felt so broken and lost that you believed you simply couldn’t keep going on in life, as if the barriers of your life caved in and suffocated the very existence in which you lived? This pain was all that I knew in the months following my grandfather’s loss to cancer in July of 2008. Fighting until his dying breath, it was a moment in my life that rocked and shattered my heart like fragile glass. His death required me to adapt to and appreciate life and showed me that no obstacle is to big overcome if you maintain hope and a positive outlook.

If I, Yesung Shin, am to be terminally ill the following circumstances are what I wish to happen to my body. I choose my parents to be the ultimate voice in selecting what to do in terms of my health, because I know they have my best intentions at hand and I have also spoken briefly with them regarding my wishes. First off I want to be placed at home, opposed to a medical setting, and with my family, because to me home is more personal than any healthcare type setting. When I was younger I witnessed my mom, a Lymphoma Cancer survivor, staying in the hospital for extended amounts of time and felt how suffocating the environment was, even though I was just visiting.

During my sophomore year, I became depressed and antisocial due to problems in my life. My mother has been sick with a brain tumor since 2009 and she was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012. It has been very hard on me and especially for my mother. I worry about her because she has shown signs of severe depression, she often talks about that she would rather be dead than alive anymore. After all of the pain, all of the humiliation of not being able to walk well, the embarrassment of not being able to write well, all of the staring and comments I would hear about my mother, she is still strong. After 6 years of pain and suffering along the way, I do not blame her. Everything seems to get worse. She now needs surgery due to avascular necrosis that was caused by many years of chemotherapy. I began to lose motivation slowly because I did not have any friends in any of my classes and I felt like I was stuck in a

When I was in 6th grade my Aunt Dana was fighting cancer, and had been for 3 ½ years, I supported her all the way through it. So we held a rally in Thompsonville to support her and show her how much she meant to all of us, and that if she could fight cancer and get up every morning knowing it could be her last than we can get up and fight our battles. She was my light in a very dark tunnel.

You never realize how evil cancer truly is until it affects you or your family. I was four when cancer first affected me, stage four leukemia. My two year old cousin Conor was on the verge of death, and I had absolutely no clue. For the first nine months of his fight all I knew that he was sick, I assumed he had a cold, not fighting for his life. When I was five my mom sat me down to tell me that Conor was not going to make it, and that my brother and I were going with her to Albany to visit him. His bones were sticking out, his head looked like a bowling ball, and his skin was a pale blue. He looked like a child in a concentration camp during World War II. Honestly if you were to think of what a dead child looked like, that was him. That was the first time I realized that my mom was right, and that Conor was not going to make it.

A woolen blanket. A thick one, so thick that if you climbed under it, it would be hard to breathe. Now it is wet, a lingering dampness that won't go away no matter how much you want it to. The dampness leads to a chill, and the chill works into your bones. You would be so much warmer without the blanket, but it's too heavy to throw off. That is depression. When I was six years old, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. I lived every day with tears in my eyes as my mother lived in pain and could not bring herself to eat or drink. I longed for her suffering to subside and for her to rebuild her strength and act like her joyful self again. However, that never happened. On March 9th, 2009, she lost her battle with cancer. After she died, I

In the fall of 2012, my mother almost succumbed to her illness. I had just begun my freshman year of high school midst angry conversations between my parents and the threat of separation. It would seem as if they bickered about the most irrelevant things, almost as if they had no other reason to fight other than the fight itself. Those moments were excruciatingly lonely, my father worked until the dead of night and my mother would come home exhausted from treatment. I now know that there was no one who felt more unvalued than my mother. I wish I had the ability to iron away this blunder that destiny had fabricated, however foolish this desire is.

By the time I entered the third grade, my parents were divorced and my mom was diagnosed with bipolar, depression and I was diagnosed with ADHD. My mom has always stressed the importance of working for what I wanted. As a kid, I developed a strong passion for technology, which inspired me to come to the University of West Georgia to pursue Computer Science. My first semester here at the University, I found out through Facebook that one of aunts had passed away. I was devastated because I visited her before going off the school and even though she was in the hospital I thought that she was going to be okay. Also, I had already lost two of my other aunts the same year and they had all died three months apart. I didn’t want tell my mom that

She is one of the new of the new residents at the LTC, it was just a few minutes after lunch, a visiting lab nurse asked me to go check the resident that she asked to used the washroom. So I wheeled her to the to her room, collected all the required equipment needed. The resident didn’t know that she had already soiled herself. I put on my gloves after hand hygiene. The I soaked some clothes with warm water. Then I assisted her in transferring from her wheelchair to the toilet seat. When I pulled down her brief, then we noticed that she has already soiled herself. She felt really bad about it, saying “this has never happened before, I am so sorry” I kept telling her that it's alright that it can happen sometimes, that it is not her fault. She

Anything can happen at any given time. I was determined to know how to care for my family members as well as learn more about the disease itself. So I persuaded school for practical nursing, within this year I had committed to I went through a series of unfortunate events. The first semester I lost a friend to Diabetes Mellitus. She fell into diabetic coma and did not make it out. The second semester yet again I lost another dear friend, this time was suicide. Third and final semester I was already a wreck with what I already was going through then right before my last clinical check off I got hit with bad news. My aunt Terry on my father’s side of the family had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite all the negative events happening in my life I managed to graduate with a 3.5GPA, earned my practical nurse diploma and passed my exam from state boards of nursing.

A very close family member was diagnosed with an incurable illness and was detected late. She came and talked to me after a doctor’s appointment, and shared with me that the doctor informed her that the treatment she is on, is not working and there are only four treatments available to control it only. She had tried three of the four treatments without success. And if the last treatment does not work either, the doctor does not know what approach they would take. Her tears started rolling down her face, and for the first time, I did not have any jokes or words. I was able to see and felt her pain and sorrow; she stopped talking and burst to cry. I hugged her and truly told her that I am so sorry and I will be here to support her. I also said

Over the course of my life, I have encountered many obstacles or challenges. These obstacles or challenges have made me who I am today. As the years went on, I hit Freshman year. It was a major year for me because not only was it a great time in school and in football, but it was a hard time for me. On June 10, 2016 at 10:00 p.m. my mom called me and my brother down from our rooms and told us that we had to get dressed immediately and then we got in the car. We headed towards Anderson Hospital in Maryville, IL around 10:30 p.m. I kept asking my mom questions about why we were going there and what happened, but she would never tell me. So when we got to the hospital, I saw that my uncles, grandparents, dad and step-brother there but my step