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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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The Ancient Paths
I received my diagnosis – salivary gland cancer, a type so rare that it doesn’t have a real name – just two weeks after I moved across the country to start a full-time graduate program. In movies or shows, when someone receives a cancer diagnosis, they’re in the doctor’s office, holding hands with a loved one, sitting across the desk from the physician with scan results in the background. When I received my diagnosis, I was walking home from picking up Korean takeout.
Read More...Pierced by the Light
As somewhat of a cancer pro, I feel like I should be able to articulate the loneliness and isolation of the cancer experience pretty easily. I mean, I’ve done this dance more than once, for Pete’s sake!
Read More...Silence
Cancer is full of silence, even before diagnosis. The healthy cells that should be loud and destroy cancer cells go silent, allowing cancer to slowly and quietly ravage the bodies. Silently becoming deadly.
Read More...What Happens After the Messy Middle?
The messy middle is what I’ve called the post diagnosis and active treatment era of living with cancer. But survivorship? Being a survivor? Wow, even writing that still seems like a foreign word to me.
Read More...The Hardest Part
I would often get the question: “What was the hardest part about having cancer?” And I never really knew how to answer that. Not because I didn’t have an answer in mind, but because I didn’t think it was the answer people were expecting of me.
Read More...Isolated and Lonely, But Not Alone
Being the extroverted introvert that I am when I was diagnosed with cancer April 2021, I didn’t realize exactly how isolating being diagnosed during a Worldwide Pandemic would be.
Read More...We Understand Each Other
There are times in each of our lives that we feel isolated from the people around us. We feel left out, struggle making friends, finding our purpose, but that’s life, right?
Read More...On an Island Far Away From Home
I don’t think I can think of anything more isolating than having cancer and ongoing treatment in a foreign land away from home, friends, and family.
Read More...Diagnosis
Everyone’s journey with cancer is different. And yet, everyone’s begins the same. One minute, you’re a person. The next, you’re a patient. A cancer patient.
Read More...Into the Woods
Cancer is one of those things in life that everyone understands is a tragic occurrence, but no one *really* understands what it’s like unless they’ve been through it, or are close to someone who has—which is one of the reasons, of course, why it can feel especially isolating to be an AYA cancer patient.
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