All posts tagged: survivor

Cancer saved me… really.

One of my fellow health coaches posted a TED video today called “What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living” and it got me thinking about the road between perfectly healthy and gravely ill. If you think about it, ALL of us are on that continuum, and some days are much closer to the ill end than others. For me it wasn’t days, it was decades. In 2005 I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. (I’m not sure why I capitalized that, but for me it was a pivotal event in my life). It was a game changer. It stopped me and my family in our tracks. We rallied, but my view of life as I knew it was over. You look at everything differently from that moment forward, and sometimes that is a good thing. And you are never that same Pre-Diagnosis person again. You simply cannot be. Your view on mortality shifts. I was lucky, it had not spread to my lymph nodes, but I still opted to go through both chemo and radiation treatments. …

10 Years Ago Today

Ten years ago today I heard the words from my husband “It’s cancer”.  He stood in Recovery Room with tears in his eyes and had to tell me my biopsy was positive. I was in shock and scared out of my mind.  For about a day.  And then we went into fighting mode.  Not that I wasn’t still scared.  I was.  Every single day.  As a former nurse, this wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  This was the thing that happened to someone else. The Hardest moment came a week later when I sat in the “Cancer Center” waiting room at our local hospital.  Here I was with my husband, who is a cancer surgeon, and I really wanted to run out of the room.  I wasn’t scared of seeing the oncologist, or the treatments, but sitting in that room with others who were struggling, some who were clearly fighting a much larger fight than I was — that was the thing that I didn’t want to see.  Was that my future? It felt too …