Darina Relyea and Blayne Marion
Geurin
English Honors 10
November 22, 2011
Turning Tables The lights above my head started flickering as I stared blankly at my father in the hospital bed. The over-powering stench of cleaning products filled the air. I glanced at my two brothers as they adjusted themselves in the love seat. My mom was out in the hallway, and I could see her through the window in the door, talking to a doctor. My father coughed harshly and grabbed his chest. That was the whole reason we were here, his chest pains were so unbearable and his coughing seemed to get worse each day (Chace, Reeve. "Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen, 2011. Web. 9 Nov. 2011). I couldn't hear anything that they were saying, but the doctor had a clipboard full of papers that I assumed to be the test results. My dad's nurse, Betty, walked into the room; bringing that ray of sunshine that always seemed to be with her. The door was open just long enough for me to hear part of the conversation between my mother and the doctor.
"...CT scans... " I heard the doctor say, shaking his head and pointing to the clipboard. The look on my mom's face scared me, and I could see that it frightened my brothers just as much. I looked at my dad; he was lying down on the bed, and his fingers were a yellowish color and wrinkles formed around his lips from all the cigarettes.
"Hello!!" Betty beamed as she walked towards my dad.
"Now, I'm just going to check your blood pressure and heart rate," she said in a sweet southern accent. My father nodded and lifted himself into a sitting position; that put him into a violent coughing fit. As he quieted down, Betty wrapped the cuff around his upper arm and began to pump the little air balloon and focused her eyes on the dial (“How Is Blood Pressure Tested? Guide to Lowering HBP." NIH Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/detect/tested.htm.).
"How old are your kids?" she questioned us with a smile.
"21," Bailey announced first.
"18," Logan murmured.
"I'm 16," I said, focusing my eyes on the dial.
"Very nice," she nodded as she unvelcroed the cuff. She gently lifted my dad's wrist to check his heart rate; just then, my mom and the doctor walked into the room; her eyes were puffy, red and her cheeks were stained with tears. My heart sunk; I knew what was coming next wouldn’t be good, but I never knew it would be this life-changing. Betty smiled and scuffled out of the room and gingerly closed the door.
The doctor cleared his throat and began to speak first, "We ran a few CT scans, which take pictures of your lungs, and we saw something... " his voice drifted off. (“Body CT (CAT Scan)." RadiologyInfo - The Radiology Information Resource for Patients. Web. 16 Nov. 2011)
"Is this the reason that his cough is getting worse?" Bailey interrupted.
"Yes, that's one of the symptoms," answered the doctor.
"Symptoms of what?" Logan and I questioned in unison.
"I'm so sorry to inform you of this news, but there is a cancerous mass in your lungs," the doctor stated, finally giving the results. Cancer? Lung Cancer? Cancer! Cancer... cancer...cancer... that was all I could think about. My brothers were silent, dead silent.
"We will have to fill out medical forms, plan out the financial part, and start treatment right away," the doctor babbled on.
"Okay..." my mom's voice drifted off; she was crushed, and we all saw it.
"Logan, take everyone home. I'm going to stay here for a while," my mom said, holding back tears.
"I will," Logan said submissively.
The three of us piled into my pick up truck. I couldn't concentrate on anything. I couldn't even cry. My brain was telling me that this was sad, awful news, and I knew it was, but for some reason I just sat there in between my brothers the entire way home with that word playing over and over again in my head like a broken record; Cancer.
When we got home, we still hadn't said anything to each other; it was just too hard to talk about. We were all wrapped up in our own thoughts and feelings, each of us drifting off into our own parts of the house where we could be alone. My mom finally got home around 9pm, and it was obvious that she'd been crying a lot in the past four hours since we'd left her at the hospital.
He had to stay overnight at the hospital, but was home the next day. The first week was confusing and stressful for all of us. My parents were constantly at doctor’s appointments, and my mom was almost always up late into the night with a bunch of papers spread out on the desk in our office trying to figure out how we were going to pay for my dad's treatments that were no doubt going to be expensive. Meanwhile my dad's condition was slowly, but surely, getting worse. You could tell that he'd lost a lot of weight in the past couple months and that cough of his was getting worse every day. By the end of that week however, they had found an oncologist, a cancer specialist ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer) for my dad. His name was Dr. David Carson, and there was something about him that gave me hope for my dad.
After my parent's first meeting with Dr. Carson my mom sat down with the three of us to explain what they talked about while my dad took a nap. She told us that my dad would be going under a treatment called chemotherapy. My mom told us that chemotherapy is a type of treatment for cancer that uses strong drugs, or chemicals, to get rid of cancer ("Chemotherapy and Radiation." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80/chemotherapy-and-radiation). She explained that Dr. Carson had told her, "...the majority of lung cancers are not caught early enough...many patients require more aggressive treatments" ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer). She also said that by using chemotherapy, the drugs would go throughout my dad's entire body, killing not only the cancer cells in his lungs, but also cancer cells they hadn't found yet, if there were any at all ("Chemotherapy and Radiation." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80/chemotherapy-and-radiation).
My dad started chemotherapy a few days after their meeting with Dr. Carson. At first, the drugs didn't seem to have much of an effect on him; he was still coughing and hadn't gained any real weight back, but there also didn't seem to be any side effects coming with the drugs, so I was happy. But then, almost all of a sudden, the side effects set in. He was often too tired after chemo to do anything but go upstairs to sleep and he also began throwing up a lot. Plus, after a month or so of chemo, his hair began to fall out, which for some reason made it official in my mind that it was really happening. ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer). My dad had cancer.
Money was a little tight lately, so we started clipping coupons, and we all picked up a couple jobs around the neighborhood. Bailey was home for the summer, so he started working at a grocery store, Logan worked a couple shifts at the gas station, and I started to babysit for some kids down the street. Our dad's job usually brought in most of the money, but since he couldn’t work, we all did as much as possible to help out my mom.
After babysitting late one night, I came home to find my dad asleep on the couch. He looked so peaceful in his sleep, yet so disturbed at the same time. I pulled up a little footrest to sit next to my father. I grabbed my dad's hand in the light only coming from the TV. He didn't wake up or flinch. He had been complaining about numb hands, ("Symptoms of Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Web. 18 Nov. 2011. http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/3/symptoms-and-diagnosis-of-lung-cancer) he hadn't been able to feel the touch of anything in his surroundings. I couldn't even imagine going through the days without feeling physically present. Lately, he'd had trouble with his memory; his mental state seems to be slipping too. I couldn't stop thinking that everyday could be the last, or that every time I left the house could be the last goodbye I would ever receive from my dad.
It seemed like the chemo was doing nothing to help him. We were all starting to lose some faith, and even though he didn't say it, Dr. Carson's attitude, which when we had first met him had given me so much hope, was slowly changing and was scaring me a little. I knew there were other treatments they could use, I overheard my parents talking about something called radiation treatments and there was always surgery, ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 19 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer) but they never did more than talk about it for a couple minutes before it seemed to get too heavy to talk about.
Everyday my dad seemed to be getting worse and worse, and his personality faded and became more vapid. He weighed probably 30 pounds less than he had a couple months ago, he had none of his hair left, and you could just see it in his face that he was tired. It scared me just to look at him sometimes; he was so pale, so weak, and so different from the man I knew as my father. All of us were afraid that we were reaching the end. One day, while I was babysitting, my mom called. I almost didn't want to answer the phone, afraid of the news that she was inevitably going to tell me. But, after two rings, I answered anyway. "Mom?" I could hear her fervently crying, "Mom?! Is he okay?" "He's fine, honey! He's fine!" It took me a minute to realize that she was crying tears of joy, not sadness, "Really?!" "Yes! They took a CT scan to see if the chemo was fighting the cancer, and it was! The cancer is in remission! Plus, Dr. Carson said he has at least a five-year survival rate, which is apparently great!" ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer)
I'd never heard my mom so happy. "That's amazing, mom. I'm so..." I couldn't think of the right word to describe what I was feeling. "...Relieved," I settled on.
I couldn't have ever predicted something so tragic could ever come into our family. It was cryptic for me, a puzzle that never seemed to be solved, how could this have ever happened? I thought to myself while sitting in my living room chair. Then all of a sudden, it hit me; I knew what caused the problem. I scrambled out of the chair and stumbled toward my dad’s desk drawer. I jumbled through the post-it note pads, paper clips and files to find a green box of cigarettes with only one missing. I opened up a trashcan nearby and broke all of them in half, one by one.
Works Cited
"Body CT (CAT Scan)." RadiologyInfo - The Radiology Information Resource for Patients. Web. 16 Nov. 2011
- the daughter's point of view looking at her father
- from smoking
- the diagnosis flashback, starting with pains from his chest
- symptoms- numb hands, change in cough, weight loss
- treatments- visiting oncologist (cancer specialist)
- begins- loss of hair, fatigue memory loss
- cancer goes into remission- celebrated with a victory cigarette (BAD!!!)
FAMILY- Bailey 21, Logan 18, Madison 16http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/detect/tested.htm
http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/3/symptoms-and-diagnosis-of-lung-cancer
A241429729&docType=GALE&role
http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80?search=chemotherapy
http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213?search=lung cancer
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=bodyct
Darina Relyea and Blayne Marion
Geurin
English Honors 10
November 22, 2011
Turning Tables
The lights above my head started flickering as I stared blankly at my father in the hospital bed. The over-powering stench of cleaning products filled the air. I glanced at my two brothers as they adjusted themselves in the love seat. My mom was out in the hallway, and I could see her through the window in the door, talking to a doctor. My father coughed harshly and grabbed his chest. That was the whole reason we were here, his chest pains were so unbearable and his coughing seemed to get worse each day (Chace, Reeve. "Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen, 2011. Web. 9 Nov. 2011). I couldn't hear anything that they were saying, but the doctor had a clipboard full of papers that I assumed to be the test results. My dad's nurse, Betty, walked into the room; bringing that ray of sunshine that always seemed to be with her. The door was open just long enough for me to hear part of the conversation between my mother and the doctor.
"...CT scans... " I heard the doctor say, shaking his head and pointing to the clipboard. The look on my mom's face scared me, and I could see that it frightened my brothers just as much. I looked at my dad; he was lying down on the bed, and his fingers were a yellowish color and wrinkles formed around his lips from all the cigarettes.
"Hello!!" Betty beamed as she walked towards my dad.
"Now, I'm just going to check your blood pressure and heart rate," she said in a sweet southern accent. My father nodded and lifted himself into a sitting position; that put him into a violent coughing fit. As he quieted down, Betty wrapped the cuff around his upper arm and began to pump the little air balloon and focused her eyes on the dial (“How Is Blood Pressure Tested? Guide to Lowering HBP." NIH Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/detect/tested.htm.).
"How old are your kids?" she questioned us with a smile.
"21," Bailey announced first.
"18," Logan murmured.
"I'm 16," I said, focusing my eyes on the dial.
"Very nice," she nodded as she unvelcroed the cuff. She gently lifted my dad's wrist to check his heart rate; just then, my mom and the doctor walked into the room; her eyes were puffy, red and her cheeks were stained with tears. My heart sunk; I knew what was coming next wouldn’t be good, but I never knew it would be this life-changing. Betty smiled and scuffled out of the room and gingerly closed the door.
The doctor cleared his throat and began to speak first, "We ran a few CT scans, which take pictures of your lungs, and we saw something... " his voice drifted off. (“Body CT (CAT Scan)." RadiologyInfo - The Radiology Information Resource for Patients. Web. 16 Nov. 2011)
"Is this the reason that his cough is getting worse?" Bailey interrupted.
"Yes, that's one of the symptoms," answered the doctor.
"Symptoms of what?" Logan and I questioned in unison.
"I'm so sorry to inform you of this news, but there is a cancerous mass in your lungs," the doctor stated, finally giving the results. Cancer? Lung Cancer? Cancer! Cancer... cancer...cancer... that was all I could think about. My brothers were silent, dead silent.
"We will have to fill out medical forms, plan out the financial part, and start treatment right away," the doctor babbled on.
"Okay..." my mom's voice drifted off; she was crushed, and we all saw it.
"Logan, take everyone home. I'm going to stay here for a while," my mom said, holding back tears.
"I will," Logan said submissively.
The three of us piled into my pick up truck. I couldn't concentrate on anything. I couldn't even cry. My brain was telling me that this was sad, awful news, and I knew it was, but for some reason I just sat there in between my brothers the entire way home with that word playing over and over again in my head like a broken record; Cancer.
When we got home, we still hadn't said anything to each other; it was just too hard to talk about. We were all wrapped up in our own thoughts and feelings, each of us drifting off into our own parts of the house where we could be alone. My mom finally got home around 9pm, and it was obvious that she'd been crying a lot in the past four hours since we'd left her at the hospital.
He had to stay overnight at the hospital, but was home the next day. The first week was confusing and stressful for all of us. My parents were constantly at doctor’s appointments, and my mom was almost always up late into the night with a bunch of papers spread out on the desk in our office trying to figure out how we were going to pay for my dad's treatments that were no doubt going to be expensive. Meanwhile my dad's condition was slowly, but surely, getting worse. You could tell that he'd lost a lot of weight in the past couple months and that cough of his was getting worse every day. By the end of that week however, they had found an oncologist, a cancer specialist ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer) for my dad. His name was Dr. David Carson, and there was something about him that gave me hope for my dad.
After my parent's first meeting with Dr. Carson my mom sat down with the three of us to explain what they talked about while my dad took a nap. She told us that my dad would be going under a treatment called chemotherapy. My mom told us that chemotherapy is a type of treatment for cancer that uses strong drugs, or chemicals, to get rid of cancer ("Chemotherapy and Radiation." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80/chemotherapy-and-radiation). She explained that Dr. Carson had told her, "...the majority of lung cancers are not caught early enough...many patients require more aggressive treatments" ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer). She also said that by using chemotherapy, the drugs would go throughout my dad's entire body, killing not only the cancer cells in his lungs, but also cancer cells they hadn't found yet, if there were any at all ("Chemotherapy and Radiation." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80/chemotherapy-and-radiation).
My dad started chemotherapy a few days after their meeting with Dr. Carson. At first, the drugs didn't seem to have much of an effect on him; he was still coughing and hadn't gained any real weight back, but there also didn't seem to be any side effects coming with the drugs, so I was happy. But then, almost all of a sudden, the side effects set in. He was often too tired after chemo to do anything but go upstairs to sleep and he also began throwing up a lot. Plus, after a month or so of chemo, his hair began to fall out, which for some reason made it official in my mind that it was really happening. ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer). My dad had cancer.
Money was a little tight lately, so we started clipping coupons, and we all picked up a couple jobs around the neighborhood. Bailey was home for the summer, so he started working at a grocery store, Logan worked a couple shifts at the gas station, and I started to babysit for some kids down the street. Our dad's job usually brought in most of the money, but since he couldn’t work, we all did as much as possible to help out my mom.
After babysitting late one night, I came home to find my dad asleep on the couch. He looked so peaceful in his sleep, yet so disturbed at the same time. I pulled up a little footrest to sit next to my father. I grabbed my dad's hand in the light only coming from the TV. He didn't wake up or flinch. He had been complaining about numb hands, ("Symptoms of Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Web. 18 Nov. 2011. http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/3/symptoms-and-diagnosis-of-lung-cancer) he hadn't been able to feel the touch of anything in his surroundings. I couldn't even imagine going through the days without feeling physically present. Lately, he'd had trouble with his memory; his mental state seems to be slipping too. I couldn't stop thinking that everyday could be the last, or that every time I left the house could be the last goodbye I would ever receive from my dad.
It seemed like the chemo was doing nothing to help him. We were all starting to lose some faith, and even though he didn't say it, Dr. Carson's attitude, which when we had first met him had given me so much hope, was slowly changing and was scaring me a little. I knew there were other treatments they could use, I overheard my parents talking about something called radiation treatments and there was always surgery, ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 19 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer) but they never did more than talk about it for a couple minutes before it seemed to get too heavy to talk about.
Everyday my dad seemed to be getting worse and worse, and his personality faded and became more vapid. He weighed probably 30 pounds less than he had a couple months ago, he had none of his hair left, and you could just see it in his face that he was tired. It scared me just to look at him sometimes; he was so pale, so weak, and so different from the man I knew as my father. All of us were afraid that we were reaching the end.
One day, while I was babysitting, my mom called. I almost didn't want to answer the phone, afraid of the news that she was inevitably going to tell me. But, after two rings, I answered anyway.
"Mom?" I could hear her fervently crying, "Mom?! Is he okay?"
"He's fine, honey! He's fine!"
It took me a minute to realize that she was crying tears of joy, not sadness, "Really?!"
"Yes! They took a CT scan to see if the chemo was fighting the cancer, and it was! The cancer is in remission! Plus, Dr. Carson said he has at least a five-year survival rate, which is apparently great!" ("Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer)
I'd never heard my mom so happy. "That's amazing, mom. I'm so..." I couldn't think of the right word to describe what I was feeling. "...Relieved," I settled on.
I couldn't have ever predicted something so tragic could ever come into our family. It was cryptic for me, a puzzle that never seemed to be solved, how could this have ever happened? I thought to myself while sitting in my living room chair. Then all of a sudden, it hit me; I knew what caused the problem. I scrambled out of the chair and stumbled toward my dad’s desk drawer. I jumbled through the post-it note pads, paper clips and files to find a green box of cigarettes with only one missing. I opened up a trashcan nearby and broke all of them in half, one by one.
Works Cited
"Body CT (CAT Scan)." RadiologyInfo - The Radiology Information Resource for Patients. Web. 16 Nov. 2011
"Chemotherapy and Radiation." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/80/chemotherapy-and-radiation
"How Is Blood Pressure Tested? Guide to Lowering HBP." NIH Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/detect/tested.htm
"Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2011. Web. 19 Nov. 2011 http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/lung-cancer
"Symptoms of Lung Cancer." Teen Health and Wellness. Web. 18 Nov. 2011. http://www.teenhealthandwellness.com/article/213/3/symptoms-and-diagnosis-of-lung-cancer