CAROL LIN: My name is Carol Lin, and I'm principal caregiver for my mother who was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma in 2005. There were no symptoms that my mother expressed at all. And in fact, by the time she told me I realized that she had kept these symptoms, the suspicious lump in her leg a secret. She didn't want to worry us. And so she just never revealed to us her concern or these doctors' appointments that she was making as she tried to figure these out all by herself. I was stunned. This is my mom, and this is the second time that cancer has entered our lives. I lost my husband to a rare cancer several years ago. My mom was one of my big support mechanisms at the time. I'm thinking to myself that she is this vibrant, vibrant 79-year-old woman. I mean, she lives independently and she is about to face this battle of her lifetime. Treatment robs you of your personal identity. She was, at one point, hospitalized with an infusion of chemotherapy. It was so aggressive that at one point I realized that I was the one who was trying to convince my mother to fight. She came through that and we thought: We did it. The PET scan comes back clean. We did it. You beat this thing. And then three months later, it came back. And any body who goes through cancer knows that when the cancer comes back it's the meanest, baddest, most virulent cells that broke through treatment. In my support group, I am so grateful for. It's friends; it's family; it's my mother's church group. But there's something that I think people need to be mindful of, that your support group, sometimes they can only give so much, right? Sometimes that the battle through cancer is so intense and so demanding of everyone that you have to--I had to realize: You know what? To some degree, I have to accept responsibility that it's me, myself and I. The way I deal with the situation, when you're in--we're in this life or death struggle, right? First of all, you never take hope away from a cancer patient. There are way too many stories of miraculous turnarounds, sudden remissions, unexplained remissions. You have to live literally in the moment. She's still here, right? I can still have dinner with her. I can still go shopping with her. I can still have conversations with her that I never thought I could have because we all think that we have a lifetime left to explore one another, right? So every moment becomes very precious and I look at it as a gift. Have the faith that while you're on this very, very tough journey, anything can happen, right? That's what life is. So anything can happen. Embrace that.
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