I'm a mother. When I first learned that I was going to be having a baby, I felt this overwhelming desire to protect this new person and provide everything I could to this, this new child in my life.
I remember a phone call I got from a 26-year-old mother. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was eight months pregnant with her second son.
She instantly had a problem with coming to grips with her innate desire to protect her sons, be there for them, provide those things that only a mother can give her sons when she was faced with this harsh reality that she may not be there. This young mother now had to wonder who was going to provide these things for my son, who was going to protect them and make sure that they had everything that they needed.
The fact of the matter is, is that seven months before her diagnosis, she had gone to her doctor, her trusted family doctor, told them that she had found this lump in her breast. And if only her doctors had taken action at that time, she wouldn't have been in a situation where she was wondering if she was going to be there for her children and when she was going to have to say goodbye to them, her final goodbye.
I remember one particular family that I represented. The man was the type of a husband and father who went to work every single day. And he was constantly bothered for months and months with headaches and dizzy spells. And he went to doctor after doctor and he and the family were told that it wasn't cancer.
When he died, and he died two days after Christmas, the autopsy showed that it was cancer that had ravaged his brain and caused his suffering.
And one of the things that the family took away from that was there was no reason why their dad, why their husband needed to suffer like that. And that was true. And that suffering is something that they will always remember.
Recently I saw the emotional and financial burden that a 50-year-old woman had to endure because of a one-year failure to timely diagnose her breast cancer.
She had gone every year to get an ultrasound or a mammogram due to the knowledge of her family history of cancer.
The physical, emotional and financial burden that this woman and her family had to endure was horrific.
You know, as a woman, you can take all the precautions to get a timely diagnosis of cancer, but it certainly takes only one doctor that will probably have a bad day that will misread your film to totally change your life.
