a trail to self discovery...

"When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy." In the months following my mothers diagnosis, there was many ups and downs. There was many laughs and tears. It was a blessing and a curse. I believe it was by far the most beautiful blessing that has ever happened to me though. To give you an idea of some of the most painful moments my mother and myself had to endure there was the biggest and hardest of them all. The phone call with the results of her biopsy on the lump in her breast. I was at work, patiently waiting this phone call at any moment. I see "mom" show up on the caller ID. At my desk, I answered to here her crying on the other end. My heart immediately sank into my stomach. I knew. I knew what she was calling to tell me. She didn't have to say a word. A pause between us both and there it was. As tears rolled down her eyes she spoke the words ...

L-R: Joe, Mom, Me, Harmony, Anthony Life has this funny way about it. I have spent years trying to change the way my mind thinks when it comes to negativity. I have spent countless hours worrying about the things I cannot change. I have wasted good energy on people who could have cared less about the things you have done for them. First image of her brain metastases after her stroke. My mother was diagnosed in December of 2018 with Stage 3 Triple negative breast cancer with metastasis to the brain. It was only two weeks after her diagnosis she then had a stroke. They did a scan of her full chest to see how far the cancer had spread and where else. Turns out, the breast cancer hadn't spread but there was another mass found on her right lung. They quickly biopsied that mass to confirm that what they were seeing was not the breast cancer that had spread, but in addition it was also lung cancer. By the new year, my mother had been through 2 strokes and diagnosed with sta...