All my life I have been around my beautiful friends and sisters, and now that I have breast cancer, I will see who my beautiful friends and sisters really are and if they really are beautiful to me.
For my 65th birthday, I was told I had IDC, Invasive Ductal Carcinoma and needed a lumpectomy and node dissection on my left breast, well the process of procedures leading up to the operation was horrendous as was the day of the operation. Now, almost 2 months later comes the hardest part the chemotheraphy daycare every three weeks and at the end radiation to cure my cancer. Why did my life of retirement have to start with maybe the end with cancer and treatments for breast cancer that was detected early due to mammograms every two years? Life not only gives you lemons, but a kick in the pants when we become sick.
My first experience with cancer was with my beautiful sister Patricia who had lung cancer at the age of 52. She called me on my Father's Abe's 84th birthday in February 1995 and told me she had lung cancer and told me not to tell anyone. Well, I did tell my Mom and Dad and 3 other sisters as cancer is not something to be kept secret. She had taken care of me all my life being 10 years older than me in a family of 5 girls. I was going to look after her and help her cure her cancer, but in five months she was gone. I held her hand and told her to come into me and I felt her energy when she died come through me. I went outside looked up into the sun and she was gone.
Two months later, my only uncle Allen, died at the age of 64 of heart failure and I was the only one there for him too. My aunt Cecelia was next to pass away of heart failure in 1998, my family was dropping like flies.
Then in 2004, it was my Mother Ollie with liver cancer at the age of 81 she was the last one on her side of the family of Franklins to pass away. I was with her in that old Civic hospital where I was born 52 years earlier for 8 days and nights looking after her by her side. The sisters were fighting and my father who was 94 was frail going through all this suffering. I was with my Mom in the end as she struggled with morphine, just like my sister Pat had to end her life with morphine. Cancer killed my Mother and favourite sister with a morphine overdose. My Father Abe Joseph 5 years later in the same hospital was given a fatal dose of morphine by a nurse on March 20th, 2010, for a simple cut on his hand! My beautiful family ended on that day...
The worse was not over for my beautiful friend, Barb Pratt who suffered from 10 different cancers for over 10 years. I was with her for her last days in a hospice in Toronto, giving her everything she desired, but on November 10th, at 10:10 am 2011, I lost my best friend to ovarian cancer that she suffered with till there was nothing left of her.
Now in 2017, I am battling my own breast cancer and I have hope. My beautiful friends and sisters are with me surrounding me like guardian angels with their cards and e-mails and by phone.
When we are sick and alone, their is no hope, it is friends and family that should be there to help with the process of healing and in the end dying. My mother used to say, "beauty is that beauty does,"
so what you do is what makes you beautiful to others. Love your friends and family, they are all you have.
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