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It was 9:45 a.m. Oct. 14 and I was getting nervous as each minute passed. My appointment was at 10 a.m. and I knew this was something I was going to remember forever.

As I sat in a black swivel chair in the City College cosmetology department getting my hair straightened by two cosmetology students, Hiroko Kuboki and Corinna Martinez, I couldn’t believe the day was here. It was the day I was going to say goodbye to my long hair.

Kuboki began to cut the ponytail off slowly. When I heard the scissors cut through the top of the ponytail, I was reminded of my mother’s hair loss. Inch by inch my mother’s hair left her head and landed on the floor as I heard the scissors tread through my own hair. I couldn’t help it, but I began to cry just as I held the 10-inch ponytail in my hand. I knew this ponytail was going to make a child just as happy as I was to donate it.

This is the story of my mother’s struggle with breast cancer and my dedication to her.

My mother, Rosaura Ramirez, was diagnosed with breast cancer April 9, 2007, just days before her 45th birthday. I had just turned 18 and all of a sudden my world stopped. I didn’t know what to think or how to act; I just sobbed and wept along with my mom and my three sisters, Alejandra, Teresa and Veronica .

My mother lost her hair due to chemotherapy treatment. Little by little I watched my mother’s personal strength fade away like a candle coming to the end of its wick against the wind. For a time she wore bandanas, scarfs, hoodies and even tried a wig to feel like she had hair.

“Well, I thought I was going to die,” she told me. “I felt horrible.”

On April 12, 2007, my mother’s birthday, I accompanied her to the first of three doctors she would meet through her journey with breast cancer. Dr. Eric T. London was her surgeon and he was going to perform a mastectomy, the removal of her left breast where the tumor was located. My mother dreaded and feared it.

After the surgery, my mother’s next step to recovery was chemotherapy. My mother’s chemotherapy sessions were like leeches: energy draining.

“Chemotherapy was the toughest stage in the treatment,” my mother said.

As we entered the Sutter Cancer Center on L Street, we took the elevator to the second floor and entered a white room with light blue reclining chairs that ran along windows with views of L and 28th streets. In between each chair there was a white curtain that circled around the chair for privacy. The little room had a television, which only showed about five faded channels, and she had to use headphones so she wouldn’t disturb the other patients.

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For the two weeks, following her chemotherapy, my mother wouldn’t get out of bed.

“At moments, I wanted to trade places with her, so she wouldn’t feel the pain,” my sister Teresa said.

My sisters and I had the responsibility of doing every chore imaginable while my mother was ill. I had to cook, wash the dishes, take out the garbage, take and pick up my 9-year-old sister, Alejandra, from school and still find time to finish my schoolwork. Of course, my mother had her own struggles.

“I had no energy, I wasn’t hungry and sometimes I had nausea,” my mother said.

The last step of her treatment was radiation. My mother was placed in a white bed, which would move backwards into a machine that would rotate side to side, like a pendulum. A red laser light would strike my mothers chest where the tumor was so that cancer cells wouldn’t develop.

“You girls motivated me to get better,” she told us. “ I wanted to keep living.”

Though my mother lost her hair, she gathered enough strength to take an ESL class here at City College, just weeks after her last chemotherapy session. She was like a new person. She was full of energy.

She was the reason why I donated my hair to Locks of Love. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and I wanted to donate my hair to show her how much I love her and to let her know that no matter what happens in the future I would be there to cheer her up until the end.

Video produced by Juan De Anda and Cecilio Padilla, with footage by Charlene Jones, Terri M. Venesio, and Cecilio Padilla, with editing by Cecilio Padilla