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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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Life is Too Short Not to Let Yourself Change Your Mind
Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I had always wanted to be a doctor. And honestly, this dream held up for many years after. But cancer shifted my axis. I was in and out of school. I didn’t know if I’d graduate high school.
Read More...Everything Happens for a Reason…Or Does It?
I liken this phrase to “God gives you what you can handle”. The first time I heard it was after my grandfather had been diagnosed with lung cancer and my grandmother informed our minister and the congregation about his condition.
Read More...Trapped
Trapped in a bed. In a room. On the oncology floor.
Will they ever let me leave?
What People Need to Know About Cancer
AYA Cancer Awareness week was April 7-11. About 89,000 adolescents and young adults (ages 15-39) are diagnosed with cancer across the United States each year according to the National Cancer Institute, and in 2022 I was one of those young adults diagnosed with cancer.
Read More...My Identity After Cancer
My mother is crying in the other room, and I don’t understand why, but I am already trembling. My heart beats faster and faster as the doctors and nurse’s shoes squeak across the hallway floor as they walk swiftly past my hospital room to see what the commotion is.
Read More...Why Did I Get Cancer?
I grew up in the Catholic Faith. Everything was all part of God’s plan. I could pinpoint certain things in my life and say without a doubt that it was supposed to happen this way.
Read More...Survivor’s Guilt: Remembering Elaine
Survivor’s guilt is a strange and persistent feeling—one that I didn’t have the words for as a child. When I was younger, I knew I had survived retinoblastoma, but I didn’t fully understand what that meant in comparison to others who didn’t have the same outcome.
Read More...Meaning in the Rubble
Just a few months before my diagnosis, at 29, I felt like I could do anything. That same year, I was featured in the Pittsburgh Business Times 30 Under 30 issue, served on multiple nonprofit boards, and managed a national network of nonprofits.
Read More...How To Encourage AYA Community Cancer Patients and Survivors
I wanted to share my thyroid cancer story and my testimony to others who are going through a cancer journey and cancer treatments. It is important to read these articles that I have written about my own experience with thyroid cancer about going through thyroid cancer treatment and how it makes me feel going through my thyroid cancer journey.
Read More...Everything Happens . . . And?
Being diagnosed with cancer teaches you a lot of things. When it comes to the people in your life, I truly believe that it brings out the best in them, and that they want to be helpful.
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