Gary

That's me and my dad, Gary, in McCall, having a great time. The picture was taken a while ago, but I want to make a point. When I left for McCall, I got some comments from a few friends about it. "Good for you. You've seemed kind of stressed lately." Looking back, it was true.

I wish I could blame this is all on the school system, but I can't. And there's no easy way to say this. A couple of weeks ago, my dad (in the picture) had a seizure. He was rushed to the hospital as soon as possible. I was asleep. I didn't wake.

That same day after school my mom explained to me what happened. They had taken an MRI of his head and found the cause of the seizure.

Cancer.

What they found was a large tumor, too big to take out. We had actually known there was an abnormal growth in his brain about a year before this happened, but this was the first time it had actually bothered him. The hospital said that they were going to have to take a snippet of the tumor out to see if they could treat it at all. So after a couple of days, we came back to the hospital and walked Gary into the surgery room. We then waited for more than two hours for the surgery to finish. My sister Jessica was there, as well as my little brother Andy. And of course Mom. She was very calm about all of this. We all waited patiently for him.

After two hours, they told us that they had a sufficent sample of the cancer and the surgery was done. Over the weekend, we repeatedly went and visited him in the hospital. My uncle Kurt and aunt Amy came with their daughter Ali to visit him as well. He smiled at all of us when we came in. Mom slept on the ground in his room the first night to keep him company.

His speech was temporarily limited and he had staples in three areas of his head where they had gone in. Now the staples are out and his speech is recovered. We still don't know what the cancer is like. They said that it was probably low-grade, but that's good news and bad news at the same time. It may be slow-growing, but lower-grade cancers are difficult to treat. So there's nothing we can do but help him recover. Hope. Pray.

This is when I need my friends the most.


"And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love." - Jesus Christ