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Survivorship
The stories and experiences are written by people after cancer treatments. These stories are written for those learning how to get back to work, college or just trying to be themselves again. Just getting past treatments isn’t enough, it is surviving and thriving that is key to being you again.
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Rebuilding Myself, Rebuilding Others
There’s a line by Taylor Swift that has stuck with me: “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.” For me, that saddest story began in March of 2021, when a sudden pain in my right breast sent me to the doctor. I was 39, busy with work and raising two young girls, and my OBGYN thought it would be nothing more than a cyst.
Read More...Embracing Every Emotion: My Path as a Pediatric Survivor
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a cancer buddy, and he recommended I try to submit this article. I always felt like I couldn’t become friends with people from Elephants and Tea because I was so young with my cancer diagnosis.
Read More...My Invisible Illness
While it’s been 6 years since my emergency brain surgery and discovery of my rare brain tumor, whenever I unexpectedly hear the word cancer in the media or in a conversation nearby, I cringe. It’s a surreal reaction.
Read More...A Shadow of My Shadow
Sept. 30, 2020. 11:30 a.m. “It’s cancer” Death, For the last five years, I have thought about nothing but death, death, dying, the act of dying
Read More...Still Here (A Letter to Cancer)
Dear cancer, Your name and “dear” don’t belong together, I’m just being polite. You however, skipped the niceties altogether When you crept into my life
Read More...Dear Cancer, You Are Just a Chapter
You tried it. You came in loud, messy, and ruthless—thinking you could scare me into silence, into surrender. You thought the diagnosis was the end of the story. Plot twist: I’m still here.
Read More...Dear Cancer, Stay Away
Addressing you with an endearing title like “dear” seems inappropriate, and you also get the lowercase “c” most deservingly earned. Let’s not beat around the bush: I hate you.
Read More...Growing Pains
I thank you yet despise you for the aftermath of hell you reign over my life. Down to fragments, I hardly recognize what used to even be my life before abolishing everything I once used to know about myself.
Read More...You Knew Me First
There’s so much to say, isn’t there? You knew me long before I knew you. An invisible string was always there, binding us to one another.
Read More...From Ghost to Girl
Fight, flight, or freeze—they’re natural reactions to things that scare us. A tornado bearing down, a shadowy figure in the night, or, perhaps scariest of all, the thought of dying. For most people, death is just a passing thought, something far off in the future—until it’s not.
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