The aspect that i decided to explore more about was "terminal illness." I picked this topic in particular because it seems like a really interesting topic to do a research on. And because i had a cousin who dealt with a terminal illness(cancer), which then eventually lead up to his death on June 18,2010. One resource that we did look at during this unit that dealt with a case of terminal illness was the book Tuesday's with Morrie by Mitch Albom. The book talked about this teacher named Morrie that dealt with a terminal illness called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(or ALS for short), and his student Mitch used to always visit him. And every time he visited his teacher, Morrie used to always get worse and worse. It then got to a point where Morrie's health got to bad and he past away.
When looking back to how my cousin was before he died i decided to actually look up cancer and to see what causes it and a lot of other things along with it. When my cousin died it struck me the hardest because he was young and left two younger sons behind and his young daughter also. I decided to use this site for my research for cancer and to find out more about it: http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/cancer/overview.html. That website explained a lot about cancer that i never really knew that much about. And also when i read the book Tuesdays with Morrie it caught my eye to do research about what Morrie had which was ALS. When i read the symptoms and all it clearly matched the book and tied back to what Morrie was feeling through his terminal illness. The site i used to find out more information about ALS was: https://health.google.com/health/ref/Amyotrophic+lateral+sclerosis. While reading that i was shocked to see what people must go through while they had this illness. And it was horrible to go through. Reading this book gave me a unpleasant feeling because i felt bad for what Morrie was going through.
Before my cousin past away i used to always sit down and start and normal conversation and then usually ask him about his cancer and how he was feeling. And he stated " I found out to late about me having cancer, and im scared of leaving all my family behind, because they are going to suffer the most." And i told him that he wasn't going to die and that he has to battle cancer and never give up. When he heard me say that to him, he gave me the biggest smile and said "okay." In the end i was particular wrong because he then died 3 weeks after. The last time i saw him was with my fiance at my cousin's surprise party. I still wish to this day i can say goodbye one last time.
I basically learned that terminal illness is hard to overall deal with and that when people become internally sick and they know they're about to go, that's when to get all paranoid and sometimes hope they would of been doing things better before they got to sick. I also learned that people take life for granted until life bites back and makes people learn the hard way.
In our culture it shows that people that deal with a terminal illness always think of the worse. And they always think about a lot of things that they should do to take their mind off of what's going on and tend to pay attention to things that would distract them from what's going on. And sometimes being happy and dealing with a terminal illness doesn't help. And this matters the most because a lot of people in my family deals with terminal illnesses. Like my other cousin used to smoke cigarettes until he got throat cancer. He now speaks from a box in his throat. And after that he stopped smoking because he knew that he would die if he continued. And that's why i mentioned that people take life for granted until its to late to act.
I think you had a simple speech but it gave a brief idea of what your project was in its entirety. The reason that I wanted to comment on your blog is because it is kind of related to mine although yours is more of your experiences, I wanted to focus on my mother because she had a lot more experience like this. You do a good job at coming up with an idea that ties back to the dominant social practices we have been learning about and the idea of terminal illness also connects back to My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. Good Post.
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