October, Breast Cancer Awareness

October will always remind me of my Mother. Her fight to live and wishing we would have detected it much earlier.  The survival rate is 98% if detected early!

When we found out Mom had cancer in June of 2017 it was stage 4.  She had triple negative breast cancer.  One of the most aggressive breast cancers.  We knew she was in a fight for life.  We would soon realize she was a warrior.  She never lost her smile or her will to fight it.  She did everything every doctor suggested,  even when she really didn’t want to.  She was scared of needles.  One of us was always there to hold her hand through each treatment or port flush.  She hated drinking her meds for CT scans but she got them down.  Even if we had to taste them first and tell her they weren’t too bad.  What a family goes through with the fighter is unbelievably hard.  You have to watch your loved one be sick and for us we saw mom melt away in front of us in the end.  She kept up her fight until her final two weeks.  At this time, cancer had spread to her brain and it took her from us.  During that two weeks, she had three days of awakening from a comatose state where she was able to talk to us again and we were able to tell her how much we loved her as well as how proud we were of how she fought.  In the end, she drifted back away from us but those three days were so important to our family. 

I started wearing this bracelet when mom was diagnosed. 

I’ve never taken it off and will continue to wear it to remind me of the warrior that she was during her battle.

One in eight women will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetime.   

So, remind your lady friends to have those mammograms and do self-checks regularly!  My goal is for no one to have live through what we did.  This is why our breast cancer fundraiser will always be important to me!  A beautiful life was taken too soon from this earth.  I’m want to help someone else not feel that.  The group picture above is last October, she had just had a mastectomy, but was out there to help us raise money and awareness for others. 

Just look at that smile!  

Donna Williams and Kathy Bond