Writing one

Michelle Snavely
August 25, 2008
Mr. Siegmund
Lit/Comp 10
In All My Life Experiences…


In all my life experiences, I would have to say that the most meaningful and important event would be the death of my mom. It was a very traumatic experience but it shaped me into the strong person I am today. I was nine when she died, and my brother was five. So after a while the memory of her begins to fade. That is probably the hardest part for me.
It all started in October of 2001. My mom got very sick so my family and I took her to Fayette Community Hospital, expecting her to have pneumonia. When we got there they said they had to run some tests and that she would have to stay over night. I remember the nurse telling my brother and me that we had nothing to worry about and that it was just procedure. The doctor said “She was going to be fine.” The next day, the doctors found that she had blood clots in her left foot, so she would have to stay a few more nights for more tests. Right away they discovered she had lung cancer, which had already spread to her stomach and other organs. The doctor told her, she had two to three months to live.
Despite her slim chances of survival, she was put on chemotherapy and extreme doses of medication. The cancer began to spread like wild fire. My mom felt a strong discomfort at Fayette Community and toward the doctors. They were just rude with the way they told her that she probably wasn’t going to live much longer and they kind of ignored her. Don’t get me wrong, they did their job; my mom just felt that they didn’t care if she lived or died and because she was so sick they were not giving her their full attention. A few days later, she was air-lifted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital in downtown Atlanta. Here the doctors were nicer and more respectful toward my mother and family. The treatment went on, but her symptoms only seemed to get worse. She was in a lot of pain and her cancer was spreading faster and faster. After a while the blood clot in her foot caused swelling and soon it was three times the size of her other foot. Aside from the size, her foot had turned black, blue, and purple. Blisters began to appear and I couldn’t look at her foot anymore without throwing up.
When March rolled around her cancer had spread to every possible organ in her body. Knowing that her fate was soon to come, the doctor granted her wish of letting her come home for my tenth birthday. She was pretty boring by this time, always in pain and always drugged up. On March eighth my dad finally went back to work and my brother went back to day care so it was just my mom and I at the house alone. Being only nine I was tired of sitting at the house with my mom, so I tried to leave. We got into a big fight and all the sudden, she stopped moving. I got scared, so I went to play at my friend Katie’s house. About two hours later I got a call saying I needed to come home because my mom was extremely sick and getting worse. When I got back to my house, my dad was already on the phone with the hospital.
Later on, I found out she had suffered from a stroke while we were fighting. It hurt to know that I could have done something to save her but I was too wrapped up in my own feelings to realize what was really going on. I went to see her in the hospital once after that and she didn’t remember who I was. She couldn’t talk either; it was almost like she was a new born baby. She was confused at the world and her whole memory was completely wiped out.
She died three days after that on March 11th, 2002. This whole experience scared me for life and will be an event I will never understand. The thing that hurts me the most is the last words I said to her as my mother and not as this “new born” were “I hate you.” We later found the cause of the stroke was the blood clot. It turns out the blood clot had shot to her brain, this caused new tumors, aside from the ones that were already there from the cancer. This shaped me into a person that learned to take responsibility for my family and friends. It also taught me to never get too attached to the point where I love them with all my heart.