Personal Narrative: How Chemotherapy Changed My Life

My senior year of high school wasn’t spent partying with friends. It wasn’t spent struggling with college applications, and it wasn’t spent with senior pranks. My senior year was spent watching my grandmother battle cancer for the last time. When I was a freshman, my Grammy (a smoker of 50 years) was diagnosed with Stage 2 lung cancer. A few rounds of chemotherapy and it was supposedly done. When I was a sophomore, her lung cancer had returned as stage 3. The chemotherapy couldn’t ward off the cancer this time, so the doctors surgically removed half of my 73 year old grandmother’s lung. December of my junior year, the cancer had moved to her breasts. The doctors knew she couldn’t handle any more chemotherapy, so she went through a double mastectomy. This year, my senior year, the cancer moved to my Grammy’s brain as stage four. The cancer was back in her lungs, also as stage four. She tried chemotherapy, but it didn’t help, so she had to accept her fate. I spent as much time as I could with her. She and I were always

She went peacefully; she had fallen asleep the night before and not woken up. My family commended me in their own quiet way for being supportive of my mother and helping my grandmother the best I could. I’m too young to have any words of wisdom for my mother, too inexperienced to know how to care for the elderly, and too unsure of death to be able to accept that I was losing my grammy. In all honesty, I haven’t had anyone in my family die before, and watching her go was confusing and scary and real sad. But I know I matured through that process; I know this because my thoughts went from “I want my Grammy alive” to “I want my Grammy to be free of pain, however she needs”. I might not have been able to go into her hospital room. I might not have been able to talk about her to friends or explain to teachers why I was sad in class. But I was able to say goodbye to her in my own way in order to move