A Letter About My Mother
by Tera Smith Riddick, MSN,
PhD, RN
Tuesday, December 6, 2011, I will never forget. My mother had been “under the weather” for a few days. Before that day, I offered to go and take her to the doctor. She repeatedly told me, “If I don’t feel better tomorrow I will go to the doctor”. At that point, I was under the impression, it was a virus of some sort or “cold”. On that day, she went to the doctor and called me to say her blood pressure was up and the nurse practitioner was medicating her to get it down and “by the way, she is sending me to a General surgeon because she thinks I have breast cancer”. To this day, I remember my exact location in traffic. By God’s grace, I did not cause an accident, because I literally stopped in the middle of an intersection of traffic. I further went on to ask her what made the practitioner think she had breast cancer. She went on to say she had a wound under her left arm. I couldn’t imagine her having breast cancer.
My mother was a widow and I knew my sister and I would have to help take care of her. And we did. I had recently given up my hospital nursing job that September. And the day my mother had her biopsy, another hospital called me for an interview for a position I had interviewed for three times before and never got the position. I knew right then it was God’s way of opening a door for me to generate more income for her care and it did. Before going any further with this story, I want to add that her each of her physicians during this journey, I knew very well and work with them at some point in my nursing career. Her oncologist was a dear friend, and my coworker’s husband. He was not taking any new patients at this time and agreed to take my mother as a patient. She saw him for the first time on January 11, 2012.