Sacrifices that People Make

Author's Note: I thought it would be interesting to do the same book as I did for the prediction essay.

A lot of parents don’t want any of their kid suffering from unhappiness. They want their children to have a great childhood without any huge problems. Everyone knows that people always face problems, but not everyone has to deal with things like Leukemia. Leukemia takes many lives of children. Having a disease like Leukemia as a child doesn’t give you a chance to stop and enjoy childhood. If you were the person responsible for a child with Leukemia, what would you do to help them?

The main theme in the book My Sister’s Keeper is sacrifice. Sacrificing one child for the safety of another. Imagine having a kid, and, at the age of two, she is diagnosed with leukemia. Would you have made the same decision as the parents in the book? It’s a huge sacrifice to have another kid to help cure the other, like the parents did. One kid is a huge deal. Children require a lot of care: They need to be sheltered, clothed, fed, and cared for by a loving parent. Put yourself in the place of the parents in the book. What would you do about it? Do anything for a cure, or do nothing and feel bad for yourself? 

Doing something about your child’s cancer is one thing. Coping with how long it would take is another. In My Sister’s Keeper, the parents have a kid that was genetically altered to be Kate’s exact donor match. Waiting for the next child to be born to have surgery on her right when she turns one month old was horrible for the parents. They were watching their little girl slowly die, waiting for the cure to come. Sacrificing the safety of this new child was something that the parents had to do. They had to transplant bone marrow from the new girl, Anna, to Kate. It was helping Kate with her illness to have transplants right away. However, the whole surgery took place when Anna was only one month old. They had to have surgery performed on a very small baby so their other child could live. That is what we would call a sacrifice.

Some people, like Anna, would think that this was wrong. Having a kid only to have her be a harvest crop for another girl. As the girls get older, Anna becomes more and more agitated with being in the hospital almost as much as Kate. Now put yourself in Anna’s position: Wanting to play hockey, wanting to have friends, wanting to live freely only to be put in a hospital as much as the girl with leukemia. What would you feel? Pride? Would you feel like a hero for helping your little sister live? Or would you only wish that you could live a normal life and have someone else be a donor?

Not being a donor to your dying sister is a hard choice to make. Either way, there would be someone hurting. The choices that Anna had to make were hard for a girl her age, because most younger teenagers don’t have to make decisions between life and death.