Glen S. Robertson
Caregiver
Worland, WY
Biography
Glenn S Robertson recently moved to Worland, Wyoming from San Diego, and he is currently working for the Chamber of Commerce in Worland. Glenn’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was only 12 years old. However, 20 years ago, breast cancer was very close to a death sentence. Glenn was only a boy at the time and he realized that he might lose his beloved mother forever. As a result of this sudden crisis, he and his brother came together. Because of the support from Glenn’s family, the strength of his mother, and the advanced medical treatment, Mrs. Robertson has been cancer free for more than 20 years.
Be There
I was forced to grow up earlier than I normally would have. When you were confronted with situation like that, it made you look at the situation from an adult prospective, rather than that of 12 year old boy. I did the only thing I could, which was to be there for my mom. You do gain a stronger appreciation for life, what it means to have a family when one of your family members got something like that. Be there for them and be there as much as you can. It would be really easy to deny that it is happening, to ignore the situation. But you can’t, the person suffering is going to need you. Even if you are young, you can still help and you can make it easier for the person going through it, and they are going to need you to do that.
Come Together
It was a very trying period for the whole family. It first seemed worse than it was. But one of the biggest problems was that we were in the process of moving overseas so we were moving back and forth. So there were a number of issues that came along with that, like trying to find healthcare where she doesn’t have to speak French because we were living in Paris at the time. My family has always been very tight, even though that we moved around a lot. That event has definitely strengthened our family bond. You come together in time of crisis. You either break apart or come together, there is no middle ground. At that age, my brothers and I should be trouble makers, causing problems. But instead, we want to make sure that my mother is alright, we came together and did what we could to help the family and my mom to get through the disease.
Be Strong
It was long months of chemotherapy, radiation treatment and numbers of other mediation. As a 12 years old child, you can well imagine it was hard to understand, it was hard to know what was going on, you just knew the limited information your family was telling you without worrying you to any great degree. But there was lots of fear and it was one of the scariest years in my life to think that in a couple of month my mother might not be alive. It was tough not knowing exactly what we were looking at. She kept her scare from us, she kept a lot of specific treatment from us because she didn’t want to worry us. But she did her best to explain the situation and let us know what to worry about to a certain degree. As I grew up, I realized that a lot of it was due to her strength, her ability to fight through. I will never know how bad it was since she wouldn’t talk about it. One testament to her strength was that even through all those treatments she didn’t let my brothers know how bad she suffered.