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Life-changing news is never expected, and is always inconvenient. It just walks into your life like a complete stranger casually walks through your front door like it owns the place– it is startling and it strikes you dumb. It is just like the day my mom picked me up from middle school, was driving me home, and told me news I never thought I would hear in my life. She told me she had cancer. When she told me, she started to cry. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand a lot of things; I was only in the sixth grade. So, I just sat there in the front passenger seat, silent, staring at my hands resting in my lap the duration of the drive home.
The part of my mom's sickness which she and I both suffered the most from was when she was going through chemotherapy and radiation. She would often have blood-tainted vomit (there was an orange-colored stain on our carpet which trailed from our bedroom to the bathroom), feel weak, and was bedridden. One day when my grandma picked me up from school, we arrived at my apartment to find my mom standing in the blood-lined bathtub with a considerable amount of more blood spread all over the tile floor. When she was doing her customary vomiting, an artery had burst and hemorrhaged through an open wound she suffered from a recent surgery. Fortunately, my grandma and I arrived just in time. If we had done so much as stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank or buy a gallon of milk, my mom would have died that day.
My mom went through numerous surgeries. The first was a hysterectomy which partially removed the cancer, a tumor on her left ovary. The tumor had constricted a main artery in her side, so she had another surgery to attach another artery to the damaged one so it would work again. During that surgery, two cuts were made into her groin area, each cut at the very top of each leg. The cut on her left side was the one that reopened when the artery broke. The artery had been weakened from all the radiology, so the stress put on it when my mom was vomiting caused it to break. Because of this newly damaged artery, my mom had another surgery in which a replacement artery from a cow was attached to her heart, went down her left side, and stopped in her left knee. It was a little creepy to feel it in her side. It was easy to feel because the cow artery was in a plastic tube to prevent it from getting damaged or her body rejecting it.
The worst surgery my mom had undergone was the removal of a hernia she developed. There were complications during the surgery, and my mom ended up with her insides messed up and having a colostomy bag on the left side of her abdomen. By then, my mom and I had moved in with my grandparents because my mom couldn’t live unassisted. My grandparents even had to hire a home nurse named Phyllis to take care of her. It was because of this surgery my mom was immobilized and stuck in a bed for about six months. She had her ups and downs during those six months, in which she could sometimes walk herself a few yards or feel well enough to be pushed in a wheelchair around the block, or be so sick she couldn’t even bear to watch the golfers outside the living room window from her hospital bed.
Eventually, complications from the final surgery along with the spreading of the cancer killed my mother. The worst sight I’ve ever seen was my mom dying in her hospital bed, with the outline of her ribcage showing through her skin and her eyes rolling back into her head. It was near impossible to get through listening to her struggle to speak to me, because her words were too soft and broken to decipher. But what truly breaks my heart is what she told me before she got gravely ill. She told me she wanted to see me to go senior prom and graduate from high school. She never even got to see me pass seventh grade, let alone graduate high school. Death is ugly, oppressive, and difficult to deal with. Death is not always beautiful.

Thank you very much for your sympathy. She died about 4 years ago.

¤::::: I knew it was Jim's house. "...Well, then why'd you do it?" :::::¤

>_________>;
Mmmkaaay.

¤::::: Because you asked me to. :::::¤