A few months ago, I was sitting at the baseball park watching my son's baseball game, when I received a call from my mom. The sobbing in her voice indicated that my day was about to take a turn for the worse. Trying to maintain her composure, she told me that my grandma, her mother, had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, but had no other information for me.
When the whirlwind of emotion came to a precipitous stop, I opened up the contact list on my phone and went directly to the “G’s”. As I dialed “G-unit” my head was flooded with questions, and my heart with emotions. No answer. I hung up and quickly dialed again. I wasn’t going to leave a voicemail; I knew she was ignoring my call. I dialed again, this time greeted with an unsettled, “Hello”.
The multitude of questions and wonder merely began at that “Hello”.
Since that phone call, my grandma has undergone a full hysterectomy, through a small incision in her stomach. University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center also performed a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, removing her fallopian tubes and ovaries. While her surgery was a success, it also delivered more dreadful news. All of the lymph nodes that were removed during her procedure indicated that her cancer was about a stage 3, and had begun to spread. With this she will have to spend the next six months undergoing chemotherapy. When I think chemotherapy, I think hair loss, but in reality there are many side effects that a chemo patient can endure, both physically and emotionally.
As a family, we have all embarked on a new chapter in our lives-- cancer supporters of a cancer survivor.
With this blog, I hope to bring love, prayer, and support to Olga on her pathway to survive uterine cancer. She is a daughter, a sister, a mother, wife…but to me she is my grandma. And no words could ever begin to describe how much she means to me, and how she is one of my greatest inspirations in my life!
No one fights alone….
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