My name is Kirby Leigh Jacobs and I am a senior at the University of Michigan in the Ross School of Business. My mom is my best friend, hero, the strongest/most beautiful woman I know and also has Ovarian Cancer. I feel like the luckiest girl to have her as my mom, but I hope you all can feel like you know her a little by reading excerpts from her blog. She started writing this blog when she got diagnosed in April, 2010 and wrote more or less every other day for the year after that (she even blogged from her hospital bed!). I hope she inspires you like she inspired me, our family, friends, school teachers, security guards, South FL moms, rabbis….you get the point.
“I had my 8 wk post-op appointment with the surgeon today. It went really well. He was extremely pleased with my progress and I was extremely pleased that I didn’t have to go on the scale. I asked him the “hard questions”- the ones to which you don’t necessarily know if you want to hear the answers. Fortunately, the answers were mostly good. “Yes”, I could resume my prior career as a thong model: “No”, I have done so well that he couldn’t justify giving me an indefinite “no work or cooking” pass: “Yes”, based on the success of the surgery and how well I have responded to chemo so far, I have good reason to definitely expect to continue doing well and be in remission indefinitely.
Remission. The doctor explained that once you have cancer, if the disease completely goes away, you are still considered to be in “remission”. What did that mean exactly? Well, as research would have it, the prefix “re” means “again” or “once more” and “mission” means “a task or assignment”. So I guess when someone is in “remission”, it means that their task, of being cured of the disease, is being achieved again and again. That mission is music to my ears and I hope to hear it again and again.
It would seem that once you are in “remission”, you need a “mission” statement, or a written declaration of your goals, to go along with it. That’s an easy one. My personal mission statement is to live a long, long healthy life, to be appreciative of everything that I am blessed to have, to forever be surrounded by the endless love and support of my family and friends, and to recognize that no mission is impossible.
And once I am done with treatment and it is evident that I am in complete remission, life will, once again, return to normal and I will be elated to say that my mission is accomplished.”
— Susie Jacobs
