My mother, Diane Lohan, was diagnosed with brain cancer in the summer of 2014. Almost immediately she received treatments to try to quell the tumor, but to no avail. The following summer she passed, but her fight lives on today. I can't personally say that I know what it feels like to receive chemotherapy, as I can hardly put myself in my mom or anyone else's shoes suffering from cancer, but I can say this: watching the impacts it has on your loved ones is one of the hardest things I've ever been through. As she became sicker, the effects of chemotherapy became more drastic and started to take larger tolls on her than we had expected. Without going into further detail, she lost most of her motor functionality and was barely able to respond to any conversation. Although I was never embarrassed of my mother, it was hard to see her like this, as the little things like having a full conversation and even getting her to acknowledge me became less and less frequent. To make the procedure easier for the patient, the only advice I could give is to say give them as much care and attention as you can, as they need all the types of help that they can get. Obviously, I am a bit biased to this treatment, as it took away who I knew as my mother, but that doesn't blind me from all the help that it provided others. I think that it is a helpful treatment when not overused, and can provide the patient with confidence that there are ways of treatment. I wouldn't try to convince anyone to take this procedure, as one is free to do with themselves as they like, but I would strongly relay to my loved ones that this is one of the few options patients have, and has proven to rid disease in certain patients. Despite this, chemo has severe mental and physical impacts that take the most fundamental parts of one's being and leave a nearly totally different person. I wish upon all cancer patients that their chemotherapy expunges the cancer, but also warn them of the possible consequence as well.
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