Ties that bind

Originally posted July 4, 2006

I once read that 1 in 3 Americans will know someone or know of someone who has or had cancer. Maybe that statistic is off and I wish I could remember the exact number but it was something like that and for all intents and purposes, I’m sticking with it here.

I’m close to my family. I am the youngest of 6 kids and grew up in your fairly traditional Hispanic Catholic home. Church every Sunday. No meat on Fridays during Lent which explains my intense dislike for all things fishy. By the time I came around, my family had moved from Texas to Kansas in search of a better life. Having said that, I grew up in a mostly English speaking house especially where my siblings were concerned. Whenever my parents didn’t want me to know something they’d talk in Spanish and immediately I grew bored with the conversation and moved on to something else.

Today finds that my family has swelled to 23. Each one of us has moved on to our respective lots in life. Some of us are married, some are not. Some have kids, some dont. And sadly some of us have experienced the loss of a child. We get together for holidays and laugh ourselves silly with the games we play. We come together as a unit when we experience a loss and console each other the best way we know how. I can’t imagine life any other way to be honest.

Last Friday I learned that one of my sisters had a lump in her breast and the biopsy showed pre-cancerous cells. My heart sunk when I heard her say those words. In an instant it brought me back to earlier in this year when I found a lump in my breast and had to go in for a mammogram to see what it was. I was a bundle of nerves waiting to get examined and waiting to hear the final report. Thankfully it was just a pocket of fat and was told by my doctor that it is common for young women to have those in her breast tissue. I know exactly where it is and believe me when I say that every month I check it to see if there are any changes.

When I was a freshman in college my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I couldn’t function for awhile after that as the thought of losing my mom at the tender age of 18 was incomprehensible. Who was going to help me on my wedding day? Who was going to be there when I had my babies? As many battles as I had with her growing up, in that instant I realized just how much she meant to me and how I wasn’t ready to be a grown woman. She has been cancer free for several years and I am forever grateful for that.

It was around that time when I heard the statistic of knowing someone who has had cancer. I thought to myself then that I am now a part of that statistic and if I never knew anyone else, that the one person I did know was one person too many. This experience will serve as a reminder to all the women in my family, young and old, to do the monthly self checks and the yearly pap tests because the word cancer has reared its ugly head once again.

I am thankful that my sister will be ok. She is looking foward to meeting her grandson when her daughter, my niece, Nicole, gives birth to a baby boy any day now making our family reach 24 members strong. And while we don’t see eye to eye on every subject, we are a unit that works for a common goal: unity.