My mom has terminal cancer, and it sucks ass. It's a damned sorry thing to see your own mother go from being able to do for herself to being frustratingly helpless in such a short period of time.
Example: she picked up my niece from kindergarten on her last day of school before the Christmas holiday, but the cancer spread to her spine and she was unable to walk when my niece returned to school after New Years. It was a grand total of less than two weeks.
Her spirits remain high, but my own have taken a beating. Its hard to watch a woman who busted her ass to raise me and my sister as a single mom be felled so quickly by cancer.
In a way, she had it coming, as cruel as it is to say that. My mom smoked for most of her life, and had a very hard time quitting despite the encouragement of my sister and me. She tried and tried to quit, but she never could quite kick the habit.
And now she's paying for it with her life. She's not dead yet, but she's slowly dying a painful lingering death, and it's soul crushing to watch.
A miracle could happen and she could be cured, but I'm not expecting it. She's been given 12-18 months to live, and while I hope she beats the prediction, the reality is that, soon enough, she'll pass away and my last parent will no longer be around.
I'm not one to tell someone how to live their lives, but I have to say that if you smoke, you should quit. Do whatever you have to do to quit. Just do it. You'll do not only your health a lot of good, but you'll spare your family the pain of dealing with a premature death from cancer or some other smoking related disease. Believe me, it's not a cool thing to die from cancer.
