I Relay For My Grandmother
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
By: Kayla Campbell

My Grandmother Lynda Hicks. She died of brain and lung cancer in 2008.

There are people in your life who make such a large impact, and my grandmother was one of those people. She could sing, she could paint, and she was an amazing wife, and an even more amazing mother and grandmother. She inspired me that you could do anything you put your mind to. There was nothing my Grandma couldn't do. I spent the majority of my childhood at her house, and ever since I can remember she was a smoker. I remember in my grade school in grade 5 there was a presentation that told us the effects of smoking and what it could cause. The following visit I paid to my grandmother’s house I threw her lighter and cigarettes in the garbage right away, I would never have wanted something like that to happen to her, if only she had listened to me. I will never forget the day my mother called me and told me my grandmother was being taken to a hospital in a big city to have surgery on her brain, she had cancer. My whole world crumbled underneath me, was she going to make it through the surgery? We didn't know. Amazingly she did pull through, but the doctors said she didn't have much time. However, in the end she did make it much longer than the doctors anticipated, we did lose her in the following year. Before that day I'm sure I would have said that getting that phone call from my mother was the worst thing I had even experienced. But that day in my grade 11 class when I got called to the office, somehow I already knew. I didn't breathe the entire walk to the principal’s office, and when I stepped inside I saw my mother standing there, she didn't need to say anything. Today, I will now say that was the worst thing I've experienced. It couldn't actually be real, she couldn't really be gone, but she was. It's sad to see someone you know to be so strong in a cancer like state, losing their hair and being so weak, the exact opposite of what my grandmother was. We later found out just how strongly she held our family apart, and things have never been the same. If I could prevent even one person from ever feeling the way my family or myself had to feel losing my grandmother I would do anything. So that is why I relay, and why it is so important to take part in events like this, by doing this we work towards a cure for cancer, and we can end the pain and suffering so many individuals face when battling cancer, and we will save the families having to suffer in losing someone important they love.