By the month of
May I definitely knew something was wrong back in Minnesota. I had known for months that my parents were both
extremely excited about their upcoming trip with their best friends to Spain and
France. What seemed exceptionally
strange to me was the manner in which their enthusiasm for their trip stopped
showing during our conversations on skype.
I later learned that my parents were becoming more and more anxious
regarding my dad's rotator cuff surgery taking place that month.
During our
weekly skype conversations, my dad told me that he had been able to manage his
pain okay without medication leading up to May.
Early in the month he started to notice a discernible increase in the
severity of pain he was feeling in his shoulder. An additional concern for me was that dad
mentioned to me that his energy levels had been decreasing in the past few
months. Since my dad's job is usually
pretty stressful this comment at first seemed trivial at the most; however, as
time went by I started to notice more warning signs which led me to conclude
that something was definitely amiss.
Undeniably,
these signs should have lead me to suspect the underlining problem; however, I somehow
remained blithely unaware until my parents informed me that the rotator cuff
shoulder revealed an even greater problem hidden within a cluster of sinuous
tissue. Undoubtedly, the news that the surgery
unmasked a large tumor in my dad's shoulder was certainly the worst outcome we
could have imagined.
The follow tests
uncovered the extent to which my father's cancer had already spread in his body
as well as gave us a diagnosis to rally around: Multiple Myeloma. After thinking over the results of my
father's diagnosis, my parents made the sage decision to seek treatment for
dad's cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
By this point in
time, the family decided together that it was best for me to come home and
support the family during dad's treatments.
Knowing that in the upcoming months I was going to be back home and
going through the treatment and healing process with my family left me in a tumultuous
state. Honestly, even though I was
excited and ready to get home and help the family I also was selfishly
nervous. As the following paragraphs
will describe, I felt that I may not be strong enough to withhold all of the
trying times back home. I knew that I
had never gone through a similar experience and I truthfully was quite anxious
to know how I would respond to the adverse circumstances.
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