Mercedes’ Story

It was the beginning of fall and there I stood waiting for the bus as the wind rustled the trees. My first impulse was to look up at the sky. The clouds warned me of the impending rain. It came slowly at first, each drop; one by one leaving its mark on my face as if they were kisses. The kisses did not last long for the rain started to beat down. I stood there not caring that my hair was going to get messed up or that I was going to get soaked because it brought me back to a day that past summer.

We waited in line for and hour and a half. It was hot but that was not why I was sweating, the nervousness was taking over. My stomach clenched and unclenched. As time stretched on it gave me a chance to convince myself even more that I should not do it. My mind was screaming to turn around as I had done so many times before. I looked up and met my sister’s eyes, the most reliable place to search for comfort. She smiled at me, her dimples so big that I wondered if I filled them with water if I could swim in them. She said “Marce, this is no big deal” and I believed her. If she could survive cancer I could certainly get through a roller coaster ride. As the eighty mile an hour winds rushed against my face I realized that I had never felt so alive.

The person that has impacted my life the most is my older sister, Mariana. It is always expected that you look up to your older siblings but my perspective is much deeper than that. She always strived to reach what she wanted to accomplish. She has been a constant in my life not only by being there but more so as a person that leads by example. Two years ago losing this constant became a possibility. She was diagnosed with bone cancer in September of two-thousand and three. This shattered my world and changed it forever. I felt like I was standing on quicksand, to the point where I could not breathe anymore. I suffered through the worst kind of anger because I had no one to blame it on and it was mixed in with depression. If I felt this way I can’t even begin to imagine how it made her feel. The whole family was falling apart around her and she managed to stay brave. She was the family’s pillar of strength, she emanated hope. She had two knee operations one which included extraction of bone and replacement with metal. She endured countless rounds of chemo that left aftereffects that will last a lifetime. She is partially deaf, she has heart palpitations and can no longer have children. It is hard not to live with all these facts ever present in my mind, to not remember and have my eyes well up tears.

Despite all the bad things that arose from cancer I managed to learn many important good things. The most important thing I learned is to value life. I came to the realization that just being alive is amazing. No one is guaranteed another day but the chances decrease when you’re a cancer patient. It gave me a whole different outlook on life. Before I was rushing through to get to what I thought would be the important years but im living those right now, because every single moment is precious. I walk outside and instead of just walking forward I stop to observe. Things like the colors of leaves changing never used to make it on my list of things to see.

I feel so much older than most people my age, the ones whose worlds fall apart over trivial things like if their shoelaces do not match their shirt. Things like that don’t faze me anymore, everything is not a big deal and there is a solution to every problem. I wake up in the morning not expecting to find the cure for cancer but just to be happy. The way I see it we often search for answers without any luck but most of the time the only answer is hope.