Personal Narrative Essay: The Cause Of Lung Cancer

“It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end” (Edson 6). Margaret Edson, throughout her play Wit, compares ways of viewing the world through the eyes of Dr. Vivian Bearing, a middle-aged professor of seventeenth-century poetry at the university. Recently diagnosed with stage four metastatic ovarian cancer, she undergoes treatment at a major research hospital and knows the prognosis is not good. Over the course of the play, Vivian takes the audience to various scenes in the past and present that illuminate her achievements in the world of scholarship and show what happens to her as she is treated with aggressive chemotherapy for eight months. As one might expect, her outlook on life and death, heavily influenced by the works of John Donne, change as the treatment progresses.

I woke up on an especially cool winter morning and looked over to my mother’s side of the bed. She was not there, I knew that, but I secretly wished she was. I swung my legs off the bedside and rushed to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get myself ready for school.

In the fall of 1999 his doctor diagnosed my grandfather with terminal lung cancer. I was there that day when she showed him the x-rays of his upper body. Right on the outer edge of his left lung was a large white spot about an inch round, tendril-like rays shot out from it in all directions, and a tail curved over to the right side of his lung so that it resembled a meteor falling from the sky. I was there as his interpreter, translating the doctor 's words into Spanish. "Surgery is not an option...It 's difficult to say at this point, but considering the size of the tumor he may only have 6 months left to live.” I heard myself repeat the doctor 's words in Spanish, as though I was standing in the room merely witnessing the event. I

It was April 2016 when we were sitting at the dinner table late at night with our family friends. My mom’s phone began to ring. When I saw her reaction, I knew immediately. Her face was pale and she held her hand to her head in disbelief. I knew it was grandpa. Although we knew the death of my grandpa was coming, I never actually wanted to experience the loss. I stood in front of the mirror, staring at myself, crying continuously.

A. Attention Getter- I will never forget the day my mom called me and told me that she had found a lump in her breast. She immediately went to get a mammogram, and sure enough, it was breast cancer.

In the film, The Fault in Our Stars, we are introduced to Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenage girl diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She shares her backstory and discusses her cancer diagnosis. Hazel states that it started out as thyroid cancer, but it moved onto her lungs. She explained, “there wasn’t much they could do, but they tried anyway” (Boone, 2014). In the beginning of the film, Hazel and her mother are attending a doctor’s appointment where they are seen meeting with Dr. Maria. At this meeting they are discussing Hazel’s condition and reviewing her plan of care. Additionally, Hazel’s mother is expressing her concerns about her daughters behavior and she feels Hazel is “depressed.” Dr. Maria reviews various medical options to care for Hazel’s feelings of being depressed. She also suggests Hazel attends a local support group of other young people who are living with or surviving cancer.

My hands became clammy and my heart started racing. I did not want to believe the words coming out of my mother’s lips, “His kidney failed three weeks after the operation, he is dead”. I was just 5 years old and I felt like there was no purpose to live. My father was everything to me. I already missed his genuine kindness, the way his smile formed whenever he talked to me about life, and the times where we had father-son time at the airport, watching airplanes fly. Standing there looking into my mother’s eyes filled with intent and worries, I was speechless. At this instant, I was able to budge a smile and move myself, despite being frozen from the news, to embrace my now widowed mother. Despite this tragic event, my dad had a dream, a vision that his two sons would achieve the American Dream filled with infinite opportunities that can be obtained with a higher education. To this day, I continually strive to live up to the American Dream my dad envisioned for me.

“Brrrring!” rang the alarm. I woke up, turned the alarm off, and buried myself under the covers. They were as soft as a kitten’s fur, and as warm as the air from a heater. After a long hug from my blanket, I finally got hot and went to use the bathroom. “Niyah, when you come in here for a second, please,” my mom said.

On a sunny December morning at approximately 9:35 am, a little girl’s heart came to an abrupt stop. Eleven-year-old Lisbeth Collado was undergoing her second heart transplant in less than eight years, when the loud beeping noise from the electrocardiograph machine went silent. For the next four minutes, her small, lifeless body laid on the cold, padded operating bed, as doctors desperately attempted to bring her back to life.

Margaret Edson’s Wit gives perhaps one of the most alienating protagonists for a story about cancer. Vivian Bearing is dense, overbearing, selfish and arrogant and none of these attributes were hidden from the audience. These attributes are also not debatable in the sense that different readers would interpret them in different ways. Edson makes it clear that Vivian is not the warm and cuddly type. This could prove to be very unappealing to the audience, but yet Edson doesn't hold back on building Vivian's character to be more difficult for the audience to receive. I think by going about the main character in this way, Edson poses the question of whether or not an audience can empathize with someone that is unable to do so herself. Edson pushes the audience to recognize that Vivian shouldn't be any less deserving of understanding because she is not the typical saint-like cancer patient.

As a member of the LGBT community, I see America through the eyes of someone who has had to struggle to gain acceptance from others and themselves. When you are gay or transgender not everyone is going to accept or understand you, but you have a chance to be who you are because in America you can build your own path. To me, Americans are like phoenixes; we can rise from the ashes of our pasts, and build ourselves up creating our own sense of liberty and freedom.

According to the National Cancer Institute, “In 2015, an estimated 1,658,370 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States” (“Cancer Statistics”). What if one of those cases was your mother? Husband? Grandson? What if more horrifically, it was all three? For Mary Kenyon, that devastating thought became a reality. In just three brief years, she lost her mother, husband, and grandson. All three of them battled cancer, and two of the three died from the disease. Through strength, resilience, and a whole lot of faith, Mary overcame grief and shows true heroism by inspiring people and helping them defeat the same obstacles she faced.

"What 's going on Kelley?" I asked. She continued to cry, not even attempting to calm herself enough to answer. I repeated the question repeatedly, but she never would answer. Her heartbreaking crying continued on for what felt like weeks. I kept on the phone, hoping to get an answer to the question I had tried to ask so many times. After half an hour, she sighed, and

I walked into the small cottage kitchen with a bowl of steaming soup, and I saw my grandma and my grandpa sitting amongst my family. They all seemed very controversial today, so I walked to my table with my soup and sat down slowly. Mother looked at me with a sulking expression when I placed my napkin on my lap and started to eat my slightly warm biscuit.

“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?” - A heavy question that is, when you think about it, almost impossible to answer. ‘Girl, Interrupted’ ponders many questions such as this, and although it doesn’t give us all of the answers, it serves as some reassurance, that none of us really know.