Weekend Update with Ashley

Okay, more like week and a half update at this point... Man I'm behind! Also, I started this blog on last Thursday, April 30, but I'm just now posting it today, Monday, May 3, sorry bout that!

The Friday before last, April 24, was Relay for Life!! I love Relay for Life and what it supports. Cancer research is one of my passions...I can't do the research myself, but I want to support those that do. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 16, soon-to-be 6 years ago! (Yay!!!) It's one of those things that I'll never forget and something I totally believe was a God thing. Not the actual cancer, of course, but the way it was discovered. My mom has always gotten her yearly mammograms and she went in for her regular checkup, like usual, but her usual doctor wasn't there, so a different one did the mammogram and looked at it. Well, something that looked ever-so-slightly off appeared on the scan, now Mom told me that she has pretty fibrous breast tissue and that little weird spots have shown up before but turned out to be nothing and Mom hadn't noticed any lumps. Well, since this doctor wasn't her usual one, he wanted to get it checked out, but if it was Dr. Harr, he may not have thought anything of it. So she went in for a needle biopsy of the mass and found that indeed it was cancerous, but it was very, very, VERY small. Seriously, like they almost never catch them this small...I don't exactly remember the size, but I wanna say it was only like a few milimeters or something... MILIMETERS! So, she was able to go in for surgery to remove the tumor, they sent the tissue to pathology to check just how far the cancer was in the lump and found that it was still on the edges of the sample they took out, so they went back in to remove a little more of the tissue with surgery. She had to undergo six weeks of radiation to the area and go on an anticancer medication and she now has checkups with an oncologist as well as Dr. Harr. She was so lucky that it was caught early!! It was still scary being faced at sixteen that your mom had cancer, up till that point I'd mostly thought of cancer as being in kids (leukemia) or old people. Not my forty-something mom. But she was surrounded by a team of great doctors and nurses that were taking care of her and our family, whole group of friends, and church family chipped in to help out wherever we needed it. They brought food out to the house when Mom got home from surgery, my grandma came out to the house to see how Mom was doing, some of our friends and church friends helped drive Mom to and from her radiation appointments 45 minutes away in St. Joe when she was worried about being too tired to drive, and one of our friends who is a nurse even came out to our house in the middle of the night (rather than having us call an ambulance) to take care of Mom when her incision busted open. I saw then how good some people can be and that's one why I loved growing up in a small town where you knew so many people that you could count on to help out whenever they could.

So Relay came to mean a whole new thing to our family. It reminded me of my mom's strength and that she was able to overcome cancer and caught it early. This is why I love that Relay not only supports research, but also money for prevention and education about all different types of cancer. Prevention and screening is the key! Now I know that you can't prevent or screen every type of cancer, some are just very hard to detect early, but in this case, breast cancer is easy to screen for. That's why I will go and get my mammogram every year from the time I'm 30! It will suck, but it's one thing that will help me to be healthy!

I did Relay for Life this year with a team of my fellow senior nursing students! It was super fun!! We played Catchphrase and the RN game!! Yes, we learned something through a board game and it was great! And this year I was walking for my mom, Grandma Barnes, and Allison's uncle Tom specifically.

Nothing terribly exciting happened last week except for eating out at Lamberts, going to my still pointless internship, helping with the dinner served at church by the youth group, attending my last class as an undergrad, taking a class picture with my fellow mimes/burglars/goths :), working during the flu epidemic (totally kidding, MSU DOES NOT have swine flu, so please don't come to Taylor), youth group, and a BBQ at Jessica & Eric Sentell's.

This has been the weekend update with Ashley. Have a great night everybody!