I've got a story to share. It's been a while since I've talked about it and this may take me a few days to get out, but it needs to be shared. Again. It's the story behind why I step out of my comfort zone and confront my friends when I see them smoking. It's the story behind why I preach to my students and share my personal life every year when we have DARE. It's the story behind why most kids have their grandparents as they grow up, but my girls had a "Grandma Angel". It's the story of my mom, her cancer and why there are a million ways to enjoy a good drink and relax without lighting that cigarette too.
When I confront those smoking about how dangerous it is, I hear all the time that "you've got to die of something, right? Chuckle chuckle." Well this is true. Let me tell you how you don't want to go. You don't want to die of cancer. One way you can prevent that is to not smoke. Ever. Let me tell you how you die when you smoke your entire life.
My mom was first diagnosed with bladder cancer. When people think of cancer from smoking they always think lung or mouth. But 98% of the people with bladder cancer are smokers. Think about all those carcinogens going through your body - where do they exit? The bladder. She went in thinking she had a bladder infection and instead they found her bladder full of tumors. First they tried scraping her bladder, but the cancer came back. Instead they had to remove her bladder and fit her with a bag that would hold her urine on the outside of her body for the rest of her life. She was barely 50. Awful right? But at least she was alive. For the rest of her life she would have a bag of urine on the outside of her body. But she was alive. The doctors told us she was lucky and they had gotten it all. Famous last words.
I don't think it was even a year later and I was pregnant with Libby. Mom was limping around the hospital when I had my c-section with a sore toe from stubbing it. She wouldn't have missed that baby coming for the world. She was so excited for another grandbaby and her first granddaughter at that. She was over the moon for Libby. But that toe just refused to heal. Then her hip on the opposite leg started hurting. We assumed that it was compensating for carrying the weight of the injured leg when she limped. But after a doctor visit and further inspection, it wasn't a sore muscle, it was another tumor. Bone cancer. Mom decided to fight.
First there was a hip replacement to remove the tumor and the surrounding bone. That put mom in a wheelchair that she never really got out of. Then there was radiation, chemo, sickness, hair loss, more shots, pills, you name it. She was miserable, she was in pain, she suffered, but she was determined to fight for all of us and all those grandbabies she was so looking forward to helping us raise. She had big plans for baking cookies and tea parties. No cancer was going to end that plan. That all came to a crashing halt the night my dad called me frantically. He needed help and the ambulance was coming for mom. He had been lifting her leg into bed and her femur broke. The large bone in your thigh, that bears all your weight every single day of your life, broke. Not from some violent accident, from just the weight of her leg being lifted into bed.
When I arrived to help them get her out of her room and into the waiting ambulance, I was not prepared for the sounds a person makes when they are in that much pain. I was not prepared for the helplessness of watching the suffering in, not just my mom, but my dad as he watched his love, his wife scream in pain as the ambulance crew did their very best to be gentle as they took her out of her home. It was a long drive behind the ambulance that night when we knew the news we were going to get would not be good.
The doctors were kind. The doctors were patient. The doctors showed us the x-ray of Mom's leg and how it was so eaten up with cancer that is was the ghost of an actual bone. This was the first I heard the word "hospice" in connection with my mom. It was a word we all dreaded and prayed to avoid, but they assured us that the time had come to prepare ourselves and our families for the day in the near future when we wouldn't have our mom, wife, grandmother. Mom didn't come home. Mom went to hospice.
The nurses and caretakers at the hospice facility in Harmony were amazing. They did the very best they could, but try to imagine watching your mom being on so much pain medication that they don't even recognize you. Mom called me Juniper some of the times I visited. Other times she seemed to maybe know who I was. Then she stopped eating. Never being a big woman to begin with, she quickly wasted away. It was the most helpless feeling. It took weeks, but my mom slowly starved to death on so much pain medicine that most days she didn't even know we were there. And then one night, well very early morning, I got the call. Mom's struggle was over. But ours was just beginning.
If you've never planned a funeral, I recommend getting your plans laid out right now. Being 24 and trying to plan your mother's funeral isn't something I recommend. There were so many decisions from the picture on the church bulletin to flowers on the casket to the casket itself. Did you know you have to pick out the vault to put the casket in, the songs to be sung and so much more? Honestly, looking back I remember very little of that week, so I cannot even tell you what decisions I made at the time. (I know rereading the obituary I wrote, I wish I could start that over.) But one memory from her wake will forever be etched in my mind.
As you can imagine, when someone starves to death, in excruciating pain, they don't look the greatest. Pain etches itself on a person. When I walked up to the casket for the first time at the wake I remember an overwhelming sense of relief because they had actually been able to make mom look better than she had in her final days. I remember people coming up to give their condolences and saying how terrible mom looked and how sorry they were that she had suffered so. I never said it at the time, but every time I thought to myself, "she looks great! You should have seen her last week."
Then there was cleaning out her closet, dividing up her things and the worst - learning to live without your mother. There is never a time in your life when you're ready to live without your mom, but at 24 I was sure as heck not even close to ready. I was a new mom with a thousand questions. I was just beginning to realize how smart my mom truly was and that I had a lot to learn. All of that was taken from me and later, my girls.
Does anyone remember the anti smoking commercial where there is a grandpa holding out his hands to his toddler grandchild and then the toddler walks right through him because he isn't still there? He's a just memory because he had smoked and lost his life as a result. That is my life. My little girls never got to toddle to my mom. They never got to bake the cookies or have those tea parties. They are blessed to have wonderful step grandmas and a grandma on their dad's side that has been a second mom to me since the minute I lost mine. But they didn't get to have their Grandma Angel. She wanted nothing more in her life than to spoil those girls' rotten and that was taken from them. They never got to complain about me to her and have her take their side. They never got to hear all the stories about what a rotten kid I was and how they were perfect in her eyes. They missed out on my mom. That's definitely not what I want for my grandkids.
I made the choice a very long time ago to never smoke. BEFORE my mom got sick because I couldn't stand the stink. I know how hard it is to quit. Not first hand, but I watched my mom struggle with her addiction and fail. I know it is hard. However, it is worth it. Looking at my girls, I know how proud my mom would be of both of them. She would have given anything to be here to enjoy every minute. How about you?
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