“The greatest gift you can give someone is your time because when you give your time, you are giving a portion of your life that you will never get back.” - Anonymous
This Wednesday I woke up and saw the date, April 3, 2019. It's been ten years, ten years since my grandmother lost her battle to breast cancer. I recently heard this quote and it made me think of her, so this week I decided to write about her story and how it has affected my life on becoming a nurse.
With the rare exception, many of us take the most important things in life for granted; such as our family and friends, our health, and a major one being time. Nowadays, time is everything. Imagine watching your loved one take their last breath as they’re losing their battle to cancer, you just wish there was something that you could do and there was more time. Even as a child, I knew that my grandmother was being taken too soon. I just wanted more time with her.
Children tend to have a special bond with their grandparents. It is a relationship based on love, appreciation, fun and pure joy. My grandmother and I had this special bond and when I was told that she had lost her battle to Stage 4 Breast Cancer that she was diagnosed with at the age of fifty, I was heartbroken. I was only seven-years-old when she passed away. In 2006, when she was diagnosed, it was the first time I was introduced to the medical field. Watching her go through the struggles of different types of treatments, including the most common, chemotherapy, was an eye-opening experience because what was supposedly meant to save her, was ripping the life out of her at the very same time. As I was growing up, the memory I have of her hurting, us visiting her in the hospital, she helping me practice memorizing the fifty states with the new book she gave me, to my brother and myself sitting on the living room floor being told Grandma passed away last night, to my mother’s speech she gave at the funeral, is still imprinted in my brain. My grandmother missed out on a part of her life that she looked forward to; being able to spend time with her grandchildren, watching us cross the stage at both our high school and college graduations and maybe even seeing us get married. The pain I felt in my heart ten years ago, I still feel whenever I think about her. My grandmother missed out at this time, but she lived a full life! This experience makes me wonder what it would be like to lose a child to cancer. I’ve read stories and watched short documentaries of children that have lost their battle against cancer and it is absolutely heart-wrenching. As I learned of these children, I always wished there was something I could do to help them, which has sparked my interest in working as a nurse on a pediatric oncology unit.
Being in a family of first responders, it has not only taught me how to be selfless and put others before myself, but it has also given me an interest in working at an emergency and/or trauma department. During my junior year of high school, I went to the Capital Region BOCES Campus to study nursing and I received my Certified Nursing Aide License in June 2018. I know how we in the medical field feel when we lose a patient. The entire treatment of surgery, radiation, dialysis, and therapy takes a heavy toll on the patient’s body, but instead of giving up on our careers because of a bad day, we have learned that we can do better next time and hopefully save the next patient. Time is an interesting concept; most people don’t realize how much it is taken for granted until they get a bit older. Age has a way of teaching us how precious time is and how quickly it passes. And the one question that I often hear from my patients is: Where did all of those years go?
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