Elizabeth

The day Liz was born I cried and cried.  The nurses kept asking me if I was ok or sad or what was going on.  They didn't understand how incredibly happy I was.  My second cesarean and I was calling everone I knew within an hour after she arrived. I had my girl and she was so beautiful!!  My dad was thrilled but with him you wouldn't have known it.  Her hair was auburn (his was red)  and she had the face of a cherub and the sweetest of dispositions.  I was in love once again.

Life was good, Aaron was almost 5 and helped me so much when I came home.  He adored her and most of the first day home he held her.

Liz never gave me one ounce of grief growing up.  She was shy but spoke her mind. She was as hard headed as her mother and there wasn't a doll she didn't own.  She tapped her way down the halls, fell in love with dance and was in a couple of plays at Peoria Players. 

I said she didn't give me an ounce of grief, not until January 9th, 2007.  And it wasn't her that gave me grief, it was colon cancer, again.  I was at the hospital with her for her colonoscopy. Eric was there and Liz's grandmother, her dad's mother.
Dr. Wu called us all in and just layed the pictues down in front of us.  We didn't have to ask, the pictues told the story.
If there was ever one moment in my life when i wanted to run away, never come back...just keep running, this was it.  I remember feeling this one other time, oh god...I did not ever want to feel like that again but here I was and the panic had returned.
I questioned god so much that day.  I was mad...real mad.  Why her god, why is our family going through this again.  There is no way I will be able to do this, there is no way she will be able to go through what I knew was coming.  I underestimated her and could not have been more wrong.  She is my hero.  And yes, at times I felt very selfish and felt sorry for me, I'm told that's normal but I still get angry at myself for feeling bad for me when she was going through so much.  I just simply didn't want to feel the pain.  I wanted to be anyone but me.  I wanted to be that stranger I saw at McDonalds yelling at her kids to get out of the play room, I wanted to be the woman jogging the track at the highschool with not a care in the world, anyone, anyone but me....and anyone's kid but mine.
She was recovering from the colon surgery, radiation and chemo at home and I got a call and she had a seizure.  That night they diagnosed her with a brain tumor.  Right side, golf ball sized.  Now what...again I waned to run.

Two completely different kinds of cancer, two primary tumors.  They call it Turcot Syndrome.  We all went through the testing and when the study from Ohio state came back, it explained it all.  Very rare and mainly found in third world countries.  Ok, so another bump in the road.   The technical term for her tumor was a Glioblastoma Multiforme.  Prognosis was poor but we always believed.  God and I by now are best friends.  He understands my anger and I try to understand him/her.  :)

Surgery in May after the doctor took a spill on the first surgery date, how strange but now it was meant to be I suppose.

How is she doing now you ask??  She's working full time and going to school.  Am I proud?  Yes, so very proud.
Today I had a simple procedure of removing a tooth, I'm a big freaking baby.  All I could think about was Liz and how if she could go through brain surgery I could do this, then  my little problem shrunk into a tiny little  puff of smoke and I blew it away.  Big baby indeed!