Before I worked in the medical field I worked at Publix Supermarket and loved the the experience. I worked there part-time while I was going through school and even after graduation.
The fall of 2016 was when I started my first semester of college and I was super excited to start, it felt like a brand new life of mine. I was about half way through my first semester and I got “the phone call”. The type of phone call you don’t want to get. My mom got sick here and there but this phone call… was different. My mom called me twice but I couldn’t answer because I was in class, but I only had a few more minutes of class. I felt in my gut this wasn’t going to be good. My mom was the type of person where she’d call once and leave a voicemail.
After class ended I called my mom and she was extremely upset and I was trying to get words out of her. My mom was a pretty straight forward kind of person so it scared me when I wasn’t able to understand what she was saying. She finally got the words out “I got cancer again. They think it’s leukemia”. My heart sunk into my chest and I felt like I was going to pass out. My first response was to say “are you serious right now, what are we going to do?”.
The next steps we took together was that I quit college and my jobs to go down to Tampa to Moffitt Cancer Center for about four months. We had to live close to the cancer hospital in case something happens that we need to get there quick. Moffit Cancer Center was associated with an apartment complex about three miles away and that’s where we stayed. About five days a week we went back and forth to Moffitt for her appointments or anything that she needed. I did everything I could possibly have done for my mom because I know she would have done the exact same thing for me!
How my mom found out that she had cancer was when her sister and her went out to lunch one day and her sister said “you don’t look well, you should go see a doctor”. Her sister said that she looked pale and sick. That week she said she wasn’t feeling her best and she would just lay in bed. She was the type of person that loved to go out and do things, not just lay around. So I am guessing after that lunch she made a phone call to see her doctor. I am not sure if I was the first person she told but it truly broke my heart when she told me that she had cancer again.
We went through the steps and measures that we took last time when she found out that she had breast cancer. She did her checkups, doctor appointments, labs, and everything under the sun they could do for her.
That day was the worst day of my life and I hope no one has to ever get that kind of phone call. We took everything day by day and I feel like that’s all we could do.
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