Ever since I was a child, I have always thought of my parents as incredibly strong people. My dad was a diligent, hard-worker who put himself through college while my mom had a quiet and humble strength about her that she rarely acknowledged. She had always been so powerful to me because she never let things stand in her way, no matter the circumstances. I idolized my parents. They were invincible to me.

So when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was completely stunned. As a society, we all support cancer survivors and celebrate awareness months, but you can never really sympathize with these causes until someone close to you is diagnosed.

For my family, our priorities shifted and our outlooks on life were transformed. Because when someone in your life is diagnosed with a debilitating and deadly disease, your head spins and everything in this world seems so insignificant in just an instant.

My family’s priorities shifted. I started thinking about school and friends and everything that had consumed our daily lives and none of that compared to the ability to just live. The fear that I felt when I thought that maybe we would lose her was all-encompassing. This was not some solvable and fixable problem--this was a deadly disease that came out of nowhere and invaded her life without warning.

While all of us were consumed with resentment and questioned “why?” over and over again, my mother still remained that strong figure that she had always been to me. When she told us the diagnosis, she did not cry or break down. She just sat us all on the back porch and told us the situation in a straight forward and optimistic manner and said that “we would get through this”. Even though we were unaware of the bumps that lay ahead, she steadfastly held her head high and had true conviction that she would survive. It was treatable, and

I can count on one hand the times that she openly cried about the disease and she refused to let it get to her. She would often crack jokes about her diagnosis, so much so that her positivity radiated to all of us and seemingly could not be stopped. She was fearless, feisty, and ready to fight for her life with everything she had.

One of my favorite memories from the entire process was just after her lumpectomy. My grandparents, aunt, dad, and my three siblings and I were all there to support her and eagerly and nervously filed into the hospital with my mom. I remember them preparing her for surgery--she looked so cute in her little hospital robe and cap that they had placed on her. Before we knew it, she was put on an an anesthetic for the surgery and was shuffled away. When we finally saw her again after she had been in surgery for a couple of ours, we all surrounded her bedside and we peppered her with all sorts of questions. The anesthesia had not fully worn off, so we wanted to seize the opportunity to tease her and see what she would say since she was not really in the right mindset. I do not recall exactly what we said, but I remember how everyone felt in these moments. We felt joy and hope, and in a weird way, the whole experience made us closer as a family. Unbeknownst to us that day, her treatment would continue. But that never really broke her humor or her spirit.

It is for this very reason that I love my mom’s story. She is a survivor who is positive and holds her head high and does not even talk about this time period in her life hardly at all. She did not let cancer define her and would not stop doing her routines. When she was diagnosed, she kept working. She kept being her lively self as best as she could. She kept swimming, no matter the setbacks she faced. Because that is how she has always been. Cancer changed her life, and no one will ever know how hard that was for her.

All I can say is thank you, mom, for teaching me to be resilient despite the hardships that you endured. You were, and will always be, my hero and the best mom in the entire world. I love you.