Comparison Essay #8 pg 2

through the radiation. The hail started as my grandmother lost all of her hair, and 50lbs. and took so many pills that she rattled like the shutters in the storm. The storm grew in intensity as did her will to survive it. I arrived one day in her office and she was down the hall in the bathroom and told me she would be right down. She came down the hall in her wedding dress and full veil and I stood in awe with my mouth hanging open. You see she had lost so much weight she fit into her wedding dress again the cancer had given her a gift in this storm the way she looked at the situation. As the wind blew down telephone poles, she fought to eat, to sleep, to swallow pills, the cancer in this way gave us minutes of humor, pain, and through it all her unrelenting drive to survive the storm.
The big day approached she went in for the scans and the doctor couldn’t find one spot of cancer on her lung, or pancreas. He was completely flabbergasted and sought another oncologist’s opinions. The other doctor could find no trace of the cancer that had tried to bring down our family. The storm had passed as quickly as it had come. The silent killer came without us having any knowledge or preparation, we fought through the storm with chemo, radiation, and sheer will and then the storm moved out leaving only the loss of weight and hair to prove to us it had happened at all. The oncologist’s couldn’t find blasts, they couldn’t find spots they were like sad little meteorologists sad that the storm broke up and they could no longer track it as it moved out to sea. There were battle scars on the landscape but we moved forward as the sad little storm was absorbed at sea.
So my grandmother’s cancer battle was like a hurricane the moving in with little warning gathering sinister power as it moved close, it raged on for a while, and then disappeared out to sea leaving a moment of calm. There was devastation from the storm as my grandmother’s body had taken a toll but her will to survive helped us traverse the storm of cancer. We never again felt really safe as I battened down the boat at night I would double check the mooring trying to prepare for the sinister storm that may be lurking. I took away our security and scarred us and left us with a constant sense of unsettled urgency in our life. The calm after the storm was short lived as yet another hurricane blew in without warming and this one had more power, (cancer was back with a vengeance), the storm had lighting, hail, heavy rain, high winds and we fought it with a vengeance (more chemo), and then once again it moved out leaving only calm silence. The cancer had one this time leaving us with deafening silence and destruction as we mourned the loss of my grandmother and began to rebuild our lives from the devastation of the hurricane. (The cancer) I walked down that aisle in her tattered wedding dress that she had modeled with her new figure months before and I smiled to heaven with tears in my eyes and stood tall as if warning another storm not to form.