When I think of the poem, The Road not Taken, it makes me reflect on an image that constantly captures my attention. That would be the image of a path. For me a path is symbolic of choices and movement. Will I continue moving forward or turnaround and go backwards? This is exactly what the poem, The Road not Taken is about choices. For example, the first line of the poem Frost speaks of choosing between two roads of diverging paths in a wood. When I think about choices, there always seems to be at least two: Yes or No, Right or Wrong, Left or Right, Up or Down, On and Off , and In or Out to new a few. Although making choices are important in life, I believe the bigger issue would be can we live with the decisions we make.
Eleven years ago my family was faced with one of the toughest decision ever. Our mom was diagnosed with stage three Ovarian Cancer, and we needed to help her decide the method of treatment. The decision was should our mom receive Herbal Therapy or Chemotherapy? Naturally, my family was in a quandary much like Frost who expressed, “And sorry I could not travel both, And be one traveler, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could, To where it bent in the undergrowth” (Robert Frost).
Although both therapies could have been possible considerations, we needed to decide which therapy would be the most effective given our mom’s condition. Therefore, my siblings and I were task to research the treatments, side effects, etc. Well, after carefully researching the therapies in question, two of my siblings favored Herbal Therapy, and two were indecisive. However, my oldest sister was totally against Chemotherapy because she remembers how it affected our grandmother and was terribly afraid our mom might suffer a similar fate. So, she wanted our mom to receive Herbal Therapy. I, on the other hand, was against Herbal Therapy because we did not have enough information regarding this particular type of treatment.
Needless to say, like Frost, we as a family decided on the second choice, which was Chemotherapy because it was a well known, and for the most part, an effective method of treatment for cancer. In addition, we were aware of the side effects, the length of treatment time, and we also knew in advance the plan of action. But, unlike Frost that says, “Oh, I kept the first for another day,” my family’s decision was finally.
In closing, my family’s final decision to use Chemotherapy as the method of treatment was the best decision we could have possibly made because as a result our mom has been cancer-free for 11 years.