What do you do when you find out your sister has cancer?

We decided to write about it. A journal or a blog seemed the natural thing to do but we did pray about it first. There is the initial fear. Then the sanity of what can be done comes as respite instead of  sinking to sickness.

Realize it did not take a short time to get cancer but an evil gestation of a life style that is become exposed as the cause.  When Thanksgiving is our overwhelming appreciation of the time spent together we do it in so many aspects.  Our childhood and growing up is before us as poetry and pain.

Let us set up the stage for our meeting.  We are 10 siblings of Filipino migrant families who moved to Maui, Hawaii.  Our upbringing is unusual because it is the time of plantations and the end of the World War II and people are needed for agriculture and the age is turning to ... the jet age and then the space age as our mother would say.  My father met mom as former patients of tuberculosis at Kula Sanitorium and got married. Mom was 20 years old and dad was 30 but he did not look much older.  By the time mom was 27 there were 6 Cerizo children running around and when I was born we had moved into Upper Waiehu to the only private home among the removed plantation town.

While 10 siblings were in the house, we were raised with our grandparents and their children.  Uncles and aunty were just a few years older. We were to know them as almost siblings too.  Our home was a farm among the cane fields for a time and then the macadamia nut farm that got sold to persons who would be able to purchase large tracts of land with no water rights.  We were the exception, our water is Kuleana and free but painstaking to care of in the rainy season when it stops running into our faucets.  To this day, now in my 60's we hike up to the water source to create the dam that gets broken from flooding storms to restore the intake for water to come to our ditch.

From this colorful background comes the seed of what made us who we are.  It may be we have residual toxins from that long ago that attributed to the weakness that invited cancer into the body.  Both dad and mom died of lung cancer although neither smoked a day in their lives. Dad had a scientific mind that sought out the secrets of longevity in yoga, farming and many books.  He was a self taught medical technologist at the Hospital and with his earnings and my mothers' sales ability, sent all of us to higher education.  Some of us became technicians and some were financial experts and a few chose medical attainments.  None were doctors but we like to read all about it.

I cannot make this installment too
 long so I will stop for now.