My Project

So this blog is going to be long, but I think I owe it to you to explain a little background about my project this semester… I have chosen to focus on breast cancer as my topic for this semester because of how much it has affected me lately. Breast cancer has always run in my family, but it has now become more personal…
My story starts before I was born with my great-grandmother, whom I never met, and I really don’t know much about. All I really know is that she had breast cancer and that it eventual killed her. She was diagnosed at a time when doctors knew that cancer was bad, but had little treatments for it.
Then the year I was born, 1987, her daughter, my grandmother, was diagnosed with breast cancer also. She was retroactive and had a mastectomy, which was rare at the time. She beat her cancer and lives on to tell about it. But it left her with guilt and anger. And I will tell you why in a minute…
Just six years later, her oldest daughter, my aunt and godmother, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She thought she could beat it. She had surgery and chemo. But she didn’t realize she was pregnant… So her daughter was born mentally handicapped, unable to develop mentally past the age of 8. My aunt thought she had beaten the cancer. She had another daughter and loved them both, but she lived in fear. She never punished them or said mean words to them for fear that she would not always be with them. And she was right… The cancer came back. It spread to her bones and her organs. They gave her chemo again and again. She fought for 13 years, but it didn’t matter… When she died she left behind 12 and 11-year-old daughters, 3 sisters, 3 nieces in fear, and one guilt stricken mother.
Only 18 months later, early this summer, comes the story of my mother. She found her second lump in her breast. The first time she found one, it turned out to be nothing. This time the blood test and MRI showed that there was cancer. My mother decided to be like her mother and be retroactive, she wanted a double mastectomy, she was going to take no chances. So that is what she did, and it was a good thing she made that decision. When the surgery was done, the doctors said they not only had found the lumps of cancer, but a second type of breast cancer that forms in strings and can’t be felt or seen on MRIs. She is in a group of less than 5% of women with breast cancer, she has both types. So now we play the waiting game… It took her all summer to recover from the surgery and it almost cost me my summer job to care for her. The chemo was supposed to start this week, but there complications this weekend… She is back in the hospital because she has blood clots and infections. She will have to have surgery to remove her expander (it’s something they put it to pump your chest back up so they can put in fake boobs). Then in a year they will have to start over again and try to put the expander back in and hope that she doesn’t get another infection... I just hope that the chemo isn’t as stressful as the surgeries…
So every female in my family is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off. And I want to make a flash animation about how breast cancer is not always full of pink ribbons and hope and happiness…