Cancer Is Not a Sentence

By Jeanette Sprowl

This is the most frightening, the most agonizing, and the worst diagnosis I had ever had. I was sixty-nine years old at the time. Somewhere along the way, my priorities changed when I was recovering from the cancer surgery. After coming so close to death, I am in touch with God. First thing in the morning, I thank him for another day every day.

Having the knowledge of taking care of yourself and making things smooth, you cant diagnose your problems because doctors have to do it for you. They are trained for it. Good luck to all of you, and follow your doctors recommendations. Dont try to diagnose yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532027598

Jeanette Sprowl

I’m a female. 86 years old with many health problems, living with my husband in Las Vegas for 36 years, Nevada, married for 44 years, enjoying everyday. Mother of two sons. I love to gamble, music.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Jeanette Sprowl.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2758-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2760-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2759-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017910443

iUniverse rev. date: 07/03/2017

36537.png

L ife is a hard road to travel—even in the beginning.

Never think otherwise. We are given life, and we make the best of it. My beginnings were no different from those of anyone born during the early 1930s. I think myself fortunate to have lived well under the threat of never having enough food, and my older siblings all had the same needs. I could handle almost anything that came my way until I was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was the most frightening, the most agonizing, and the worst diagnosis I had ever had. I was sixty-nine years old. Had I been younger, I would not have had the courage to face my ordeal.

I am not famous, I have never written before, and I have never been successful at anything. My attitude has always been to take life as it comes. I accept my mistakes, try never to hurt anyone along the way, make a few good friends, and take one day at a time.

My priorities changed when I was recovering from cancer surgery. After coming so close to death and being so depressed during my recovery, I started thinking about how to live. I looked for ways to improve my life with my husband and thought more about the feelings of other people. I was in touch with God from the first thing in the morning, thanking Him for another day every day.

I got a very big surprise one morning in the bathroom. I discovered blood on my tissue after a bowel movement. I thought it was hemorrhoids and was aggravated. I thought it was another minor problem to be concerned about. For several weeks, I thought it was hemorrhoids. I went to the doctor, and I took all kinds of tests. They found stage 4 colon cancer.

The doctor asked when I could go to the hospital. I told him I was off in a couple of days. The doctor replied, I want you in the hospital yesterday. He referred me to another doctor for a colonoscopy.

Do not diagnose your own problems when it comes to your health. After a certain age, you don’t need a mammogram. I continued to have mammograms because I thought cancer was not for me.

When I was eighty-three years old, they found cancer in my right breast. No chemotherapy—the doctor suggested taking a small white pill for five years. It has been three years now. I am doing well. Many ladies seem to ignore this kind of information. When a doctor tells you something, listen. I am so glad I did.

These are the best days of my life. During my childhood, I went without food when I was hungry. I wore hand-me-downs from my sisters, brothers, and complete strangers. I was born in the hills of the southwestern part of Virginia on my deceased grandparents’ farm. My grandparents, Jess and Juline Bledsoe, homesteaded one hundred acres back in the 1800s. Mother was the youngest of five children. She had one sister and three brothers. Two of my uncles passed away before I was born, leaving one uncle, Bill Bledsoe, and one aunt, Fronne Wells. I never knew my grandparents, but people who knew them always spoke well of them. Before my two uncles died, they were deeded parts of the property. My father bought seven acres of my grandparents’ farm, later causing friction between the surviving siblings.

Before my mother and father were married, my father had owned two small houses in Saint Charles, Virginia, with his deceased first wife. That small town was close to my grandparents’ farm. My father met my mother after the death of his first wife. Mother always said my father was the great love of her life. Never having had another boyfriend, it was love at first sight for her.

Mother was five foot eleven and had long auburn hair. My father was five foot nine with black curly hair. They were quite the opposite in size and appearance. My father was Polish, and Mother was Indian and Irish. That was quite a combination.

Aunt Fronne and Uncle Irvin Wells lived nearby. Uncle Irvin made moonshine back in the mountains and was in the mountains more than he was home. I was never told how long my grandparents lived with us, if we moved in with them, or the story of where or when they lived. I was born on the farm, and my birth certificate said I was born in an area of Saint Charles, which was known as Rock Lick. That name suited the area perfectly. We had plenty of rocks and rattlesnakes.

I don’t have many good memories, but I have lots of bad ones. As the youngest, I only got bits and pieces of my family history. The doctor from the coal company where my father worked delivered me at home in June 1930. I weighed fifteen pounds at birth. A midwife delivered my eight siblings.

My grandparents and uncles built the farmhouse. When the house was built, they did not have cars yet. We had a garage under the bedroom. As we came up to the bilevel house, a rock wall went under it. On top of the rock wall, there was a gooseberry bush. Anywhere we had wild berries and rocks, we had snakes. My mother told me to stay away from the rock wall. She once threw a teakettle of boiling water at snake and killed it. It was the largest rattlesnake I had ever seen, but everything looked so much larger before I was an adult.

Our large, sprawling house had four bedrooms, and each had a coal-burning or wood-burning fireplace. Our large living room was called a parlor. Even with a fireplace in every room, it was always cold and drafty. Our home was comfortable for such a large family, and when we had company, we made room. When my younger cousins and other relatives spent the night, I shared my bed with my sister Fannie. I was fussy in the morning and still sleepy from not having enough room in bed. At times, I slept at the foot of the bed to make more room.

We made our own activities for entertainment. Catching lightning bugs in a jar was fun. In the evenings, when all the farm chores were done, our family sat on the porch and talked. Farming was hard work, and we had to live off the land. As the youngest, I had to wait for my time to grow up and enjoy things like hearing the hoot owls, seeing the wildlife around twilight, and waking in the morning to the birds singing. It was before electricity, and we didn’t have much time to enjoy the evenings except in the summertime. We used a kerosene lamp but only when needed since kerosene cost money and was not necessary all the time.

We usually went to bed early and awoke early. In the wintertime, we went to bed early to keep warm. My brothers made fires in the fireplaces and in the kitchen stove for breakfast. Most of the time, breakfast consisted of oatmeal. When the chickens were laying eggs, we had eggs and biscuits with gravy. The gravy warmed our bellies. We always had a bit of jelly or jam for our delicious homemade biscuits. Mother made biscuits every morning, and we made molasses in the fall.

My brothers fed our milk cow and the mule we used for plowing. Mother was the only one who could milk the cow since Bessie would kick and not stand still for anyone else. Her tail would knock them off the milking stool. I enjoyed watching Mother milk the cow. We always had cats around the barn to catch the mice. The cats always knew they would get a treat of warm fresh milk.

We always canned lots of vegetables from the garden. We pickled corn and called it roasting ears, and we stored it in the basement. We made sauerkraut in a large crock in the basement. We always had plenty of cabbage, and cabbage, pinto beans, and corn bread made a good meal. We had to wash and sterilize the Mason jars before preparing the food for canning. The jars were used for moonshine, and Mom told us the canned food would spoil if we used one that had been used for moonshine. I was told anyone who drank moonshine would have a scar on the bridge of his or her nose from drinking out of the jar. Everyone had little jobs when we were young, and I had to break string beans. There were many preparations before and after the crops since there was so little help.

We had a nice orchard with many kinds of fruit trees. When we had a good crop, Mother would can the fruit or make jams or jelly. My older brothers and sisters could pick wild blackberries and blueberries, and we had a strawberry patch near our house and a patch of wild gooseberries. Sometimes they would take me along, but I did more eating than picking berries. I usually found a shady spot and fell asleep under the berry bushes. They spent lots of time searching for me. We usually found black snakes that were not poisonous. Wild fruit makes delicious jelly, jam, and pie filling. My mother was creative, as one had to be, and we were taught to not waste food because of the lack of necessities to prepare food. We were able to use molasses as a substitute for sugar since we did not have money for sugar.

One of my best memories is having a nice Golden Delicious apple tree so close to the porch that we could reach out and pick one when it was ripe. Sometimes we couldn’t wait for them to ripen. Our June apple tree always seemed to ripen the earliest. We were impatient, and it was painful to our stomachs. We received a whipping when we complained or when my mom discovered apples missing. Green apples made a bad bellyache.

When we were small, everything looked so large. There was a large rock beside our barn with an indentation in the center. It was level on both sides. Mother would peel peaches and apples and spread them out on clean sheets to dry for the winter. When it rained, the rainwater would accumulate in the center, which made a nice warm swimming pool. Looking back now, that big rock was much smaller than when I saw it so many years ago.

Mother cooked large meals on a wood- or coal-burning stove with an area on the side to heat water. Our eating table was also large, having to feed up to ten people—if we didn’t have company—on wooden benches. Mother and Father ate at each end. The younger children ate last. As the youngest, I had to eat a lot of chicken wings and necks. To this day, those are my favorite parts of a chicken. We had chickens and a pig for winter meat. The garden kept us fed. My oldest brother, John, helped plant the garden. I sat on the damp ground and watched him plant potatoes in March. When I told him I was hot, he knew something was wrong. I had pneumonia, and I was ill for several weeks.

It was hard to keep enough food. Without the help of my oldest sister, Virgie, and her husband, Tom Osborne, we would have been hungry more often than not. Tom brought us salt, baking soda, flour, and sugar. Every once in a while, he brought me a piece of peppermint candy. I know their family did without to help our family. Tom was working in the coal mines, and they were living in a company-owned house. They had to buy their groceries at the company store. Those days were hard times for all of us.

My father went into the coal mines at the age of twelve. He went into the mines before daylight and came out after dark—sometimes seven days a week—for little pay. Mother stayed home and raised a family of nine. When I was two and a half, my father passed away at the age of fifty. I was too young to remember my father, but I have always been told he worked hard for his family and was an honest man. I have only seen pictures of my father and can’t remember him at all.

I don’t know how my mom and dad managed on such a small income, but we always had clothes for church and shoes for winter. Our neighbors didn’t have too much. Everyone was poor, but we just didn’t know it.

I walked to and from a one-room schoolhouse. Being so young, it was hard to keep up. We even went to school in the winter, and we got