Why?

For four years after the pneumonia episode my dad did really well. Pretty much the only time he had to visit the hospital was for tests, it finally looked like he was better. We all thought things were back to normal, except for the fact that dad couldn’t work.

On January 9, 2008 my mom, dad, sister, and grandparents all came to Crestwood to watch me participate in the geography, I was in seventh grade and I was not expecting to do very well in the geography bee, I was good at geography, but I had been in the geography bowl a few times before and never really did all that well in it, but this time I won! It was great, we were all shocked. When we went home, I was ecstatic, but my dad was acting weird, none of us knew what was wrong, but he seemed in pain, and not as excited as he normally would be for me.

I walked outside, where my dad was, and I could hear him yelling for somebody to call 911. I panicked and ran over to the kennel, where my mom was. I told her to call for an ambulance. In stead of just calling the ambulance she ran outside and found my dad who by then had made to his chair on the porch and was sitting down. He did not look very good. He thought he was having a heart attack which was extremely scary. None of us knew what to do. We called 911 and waited, they took forever! As we waited for the ambulance to show up, a thousand things were going through my mind just, questions like, why, why us?. It seemed like God was picking on us, even though I knew he wasn’t. After my dad’s initial diagnosis with cancer we had all grown a lot closer to God, before the diagnosis we attended church maybe every other Sunday and only prayed at holidays and on Sundays. After the diagnosis we began to attend church every Sunday, and since the diagnosis, there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t thanked God for everything we have, and asked him to just bless my dad and anybody else who has been in a similar situation. This was testing my faith, and I didn’t know it then, but my faith would be tested a lot more over the next couple of years. When the ambulance finally arrived we had been waiting for over half an hour and we were scared. They rushed my dad to the hospital, where they determined he wasn’t having a heart attack, just a panic attack and after some x-rays they also determined he had pneumonia. They put my dad on an antibiotic and told him to avoid stressful situations then several days later when he was not getting better the doctors ordered a MRI which showed that my dad had a mass in his lung that looked like it was cancer. My dad, after a very drawn-out process of endless testing was determined to have small cell lung cancer.