Mick Upchurch
Honors World Literature
Mr. Thornton
3/23/15

The Fight for My Life

I walked into the colossal Florida Hospital Memorial Medical Center and felt how cheerless and doleful all of the people in the hospital felt. Most people in hospitals either had something terribly wrong with them or were there to help cheer up a loved one. Everything inside of the hospital was grey on the first floor. Even just walking in had a gloomy feel. It was so quiet you could hear a pen drop. It felt as if I was walking into a morgue and all of the people were already dead.
I walked up the stairs and onto the second floor, where I then walked into a room where I met eleven women who were going through chemo therapy. The room was busy with multiple side conversations between the various women, and they all seemed to be getting along well. I met with these women once a week, and tried to give them hope and show them that life is the same after beating breast cancer, and that they will make it. These women were not all depressed, but rather happy to get together with a group that they could laugh together about how they are losing their eyebrows, or about how they are sick and tired of wearing wigs, small things like that. They all were ecstatic to be able to stop thinking about all the other stress in their lives.
Most of them were having financial issues, family issues, or starting to lose hope. I arranged these meetings and wanted to get together with these women to show them that they all are still the same people, and to make them smile and enjoy the small things in life. They loved being

able to have other people that could relate to their problems. Nobody wanted to go home and complain to their husband or friends who did not have cancer, because the other people could not relate, and the patients did not want other people to take too much pity on them.
The women also loved hearing parts of my story. They loved hearing how I got through the chemo therapy while raising a family, and how I dealt with the pain and the toll that chemo put on me. The trick throughout the whole journey was to never give up hope and to know that eventually they would become the same women they once were. Every persons journey is a little bit different. Nobody had the exact same amount of cancer in their body, or had the same emotional problems. I was in a group very similar to the group I now lead, and there were eight other women in the group with me. I was the only woman to survive. We always met, on tuesdays of every week with zero exceptions. All of us would always get together. No matter how many died, we kept meeting, even until it was only one other woman and me. We always kept our heads up, even though we all knew that there was a very good chance that we would die. Our families were scared for us, and knew that we were battling the odds. This made the women that currently have breast cancer look at their journey in a different way. They now knew that they had better chances than many people before them did. Having new medical technology has helped save so many lives. Seeing that somebody else had it off even harder than they did made the women think about the journey in a different way. It gave them even more hope. ******

As a young woman, I knew that breast cancer was a great possibility for me. My mother and grandmother died from it, so I knew I needed to be checked out much more than the average person would. I tried not to think about the possibility that I could get the cancer that killed my mother and grandmother, because the thought of that petrified me. I knew if I did get breast cancer and wanted to survive, I would have to catch it fast and act quickly. My mother told me towards the later stages of her life that she wished that she would have attacked the cancer in a more aggressive way. By that she meant that she would rather have had chemo