What would you do to live?

I always wondered how I would behave if I were told I had cancer. After watching my aunt Polly suffer for so long but brave through treatments with such an inspirational attitude (twice), and then again watching my mom do the same (twice), I wonder if I would be able to battle through it the way they did. It makes me wonder what I would do to live, what I would do to be as strong as them. Everyone always says, "Oh, I wouldn't be like that" or "I know exactly what I would do" but the thing is, you really never know how you would behave and what exactly you would do after you hear the words, "You have cancer."

The night my mom was diagnosed, she asked the doctor how long she would live if she didn't go through the chemo, seeing as the first bout made her deathly ill. He responded, "Three weeks to a month." Is there any other choice but to try? What would she have done to still be with us for longer than a month?

My mom hated coffee and tea, she never drank any of it. For her nausea, I bought ginger lemon tea, and she drank it several times a day to avoid feeling sick. For nearly seven months. Even though she hated the smell, and she hated the taste even worse.

She loved her hair, and she was devastated during her breast cancer when she lost it. She was embarrassed and completely ashamed of how she looked, and she always wore a wig. This time around, when it started to fall out, she shaved her head. And she wore different colored ballcaps depending on the outfit she was wearing. She was not ashamed, and she was not embarrassed. And everywhere we went, she got compliments on her hat, and she loved it.

In order to begin killing the cancer cells, she had to have chemotherapy straight for nearly a week, every month. A total of five times. She had seven or eight different types of chemo, with one of them being the "red devil." If you are in any way familiar with cancer treatment, Adriomycin, the "red devil," is the worst of all chemos. It is bright, neon red, and it coursed through her veins for 24 hours continuously, three different times.

During my mom's third round of chemotherapy, her sister was laying in bed in the Hospice unit three floors down. She finished her last round of chemo at 4 o'clock in the morning. She watched her sister take her last breath, because of the same disease she herself was fighting, at 11:30 that morning.

Despite losing her dear sister, she never let it break her spirit. She remained positive and upbeat, and continued to fight for her life. She went on to have two more rounds of chemo, not even knowing if working towards remission would be worth it, since a bone marrow match cannot be found for nearly 70% of the population. She still tried, and she remained hopeful that they would find a match for her.

They did. They found three. One was a 100% perfect match. She was exhausted, fighting pneumonia, c-diff, and weakness from the previous five chemotherapy treatments. But she was excited.

She was also extremely nervous, for all of the things you hear about a bone marrow transplant and for all of the things that she would miss while she was in the hospital. The serious total-body radiation, the intense, continuous chemotherapy, the sickness, the infections, the mouth sores. She was so frightened. But instead of dwelling on that, she obliged showing up at a prayer vigil in her honor, despite her distaste for being the center of attention. While she was nervous to move on with having a transplant from a complete stranger, a 40-year-old male from somewhere in Europe, she joked about gaining a French accent, growing red, curly hair, or developing a taste for lager. She never lost her sense of humor or her great outlook on her future.

Every round of chemo called for a another bone marrow biopsy. The first four, completed at Aultman, included sedation and an experience that remained only a distant memory. "I couldn't feel a thing!" she'd say afterwards, and she'd immediately put it behind her. The fifth, done at Cleveland Clinic, left her completely awake and aware, knowing full well they were drilling a needle into the top of her hip bone, with no sedation, no pain medication. She cried, and made herself sick to her stomach, she was so upset to not have the same treatment she had at Aultman. But, she did it. And she put it behind her.

The night they transferred her to ICU, and her body had already begun to shut down, I walked into her room, after not having seen her in over a week. I was trying to protect her, because I had an infection similar to mono. I missed her dearly, and couldn't wait to see her face again. I never imaged it would be in a fit of hurry, rushing up to Cleveland after getting the news that she was septic. I looked at her cracked, bloody lips and her yellow, jaundiced eyes. Her head was bobbing on and off her pillow, and she finally caught my gaze. Despite having an infection racing through her veins and poisoning all of her organs, despite her mouth and throat being so sore she could barely speak, despite the liver-failure toxins attacking her entire body and her brain, she said, "I feel fine! I feel better than I have in days!" She tried to reassure me that she was OK, that she would come out of this. When her blood pressure started to drop and her heart rate started to rise, and she had a swarm of doctors and nurses around her, preparing the defibrillator and trying to avoid a Code Blue, the doctor asked her if she had any questions and if she was alright. She looked directly at him and said, "My daughter's here and she's really scared," through her oxygen mask and through her struggles to breathe. She was as strong as she could be, and she never thought of herself first, not even as her body began to shut down.

What would you do to live? To stay with your family? To hope for a future? Could you be this brave? The sad thing is, none of us know the answer to any of these questions. Although we think we know, we really have no idea until we are faced with the words: cancer, chemotherapy, bone marrow transplant, infections, ICU, life support.

But I watched my mom lay in ER, after she had been told she had leukemia. I watched her go through five rounds of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, nearly crashing twice, and still fighting with everything she had as she laid in ICU. I asked her, before they moved her, "Mom-do you want them to do anything they need to do to keep you healthy?" And she nodded her head and said "Yes," through her struggling breaths. She wanted anything and everything done, just to stay here with us, just to live.

She died with the bravery and dignity that even two weeks later, and probably until my dying day, fills my heart with such pride. She did all of that to live. She would have done anything, and she really did. She was my mom, and she was my hero.