No Plans Essay

Submitted By kimbervick
Words: 1354
Pages: 6

Kimber
2013FA.ENG.111.0014 Expository Writing
September 15, 2013
No Plans
On June 7th 2007 at exactly 8:32 pm, my high school principal called my name and I walked across the stage to receive my high school diploma. So many thoughts and feelings were going through my mind. “I am so proud of myself!” “But what is my next step?” “Where do I go from here?” “What does this diploma mean?” Unlike most of my friends and peers, I hadn’t prepared myself for the next move. I wasn’t going to a university, community college, or trade school. My mind had been so occupied with family issues that for the past few months I missed different deadlines that I needed to make in order to go to school. Between my mother’s diagnoses of breast cancer, my father being diagnosed with kidney failure, and to top that all off my brother being missing, I had no sense of time or what day it was.
A few short months before it was time for my graduation my mother had made and appointment to schedule her annual mammogram. She made it a point to make sure she got her breast exam because breast cancer ran in our family and my grandmother, her mother, had been diagnosed with breast cancer but had been in remission for over ten years now. This particular time, her doctor called her back in and said her scans were abnormal and they needed to do a more thorough scan of her left breast. After which they discovered my mother had a lump in her left breast. They needed to do a surgical biopsy to determine whether the lump is cancerous or not. On April 10th, 2007 my mother, father, and I went with my mother to her doctor’s appointment. The doctor took us into his office where we all sat down on a long bench like chair, my mother on the left, me in the middle and my father on the right. The doctor began to talk and gave us the news that the lump in my mother’s breast was indeed cancerous. All I could do was shake my head and silently cry, but my mother remained calm as she swooped me up into her arms and held me tight. My father was strong. He remained calm as well, but also reach over to put his arm around both my mother and I. My mother calmly asked the doctor what was the next step? He answered by telling my mother that she was lucky because they caught the cancer at a very early stage. He recommended that my mother either has a lumpectomy or full mastectomy of her left breast where they can later go in and reconstruct her breast. After discussing it in more detail my mother opted to have the full mastectomy and scheduled her surgery to be done the week after my graduation.
My father has always had some health issues ever since I could remember. His biggest health problem was his high blood pressure, and because my dad wasn’t always the best at taking his medication like he should, his high blood pressure issues led to much worse health issues. Just the month after my mother’s diagnosis, my mother noticed that my father hadn’t been acting like himself, and he hadn’t been getting much sleep at night because he was getting up and using the bathroom a lot. My mother made a doctor’s appointment for him and made him go to the doctor. I was in school while all this was going on, when I got out of school and got home I received a phone call from my mom. She told me that after the doctor checked my father out he immediately sent my father to the hospital to be admitted. After running some more thorough test the doctor diagnosed my dad with kidney failure, and he needed dialysis as soon as possible. I was in disbelief, I couldn’t believe that not only was my mother sick but my father was to. I just wasn’t prepared to this at all. I managed to get myself together, drop everything that was going on with me personally and help get my parents back to health as best I could. My brother Courtne was 24 years old six foot two inches tall, 210 pounds. That’s some of the questions my parents and I had to answer on the missing persons report. He was always distant with