January, 18th 2025: Join us for food, drinks, dancing, and author sharing — all to support our mission. Learn more here!
AYA Cancer
Loneliness and Isolation: We Are Not Alone
In 2021 life was good. My kids were in school full-time and I was offered a job at the gym that I loved so dearly. I was already spending an hour a day every day there anyway so it was awesome when they made me an offer. That was November. Little did I know that within two months my life would be suddenly and drastically put on hold. In January 2022 I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.
Read More...The Loneliness of Caregiving
On the day before my partner Dil was diagnosed, we went water tubing. The day off was a stolen pleasure on a beautiful Monday morning in June and we had been together for about two and a half years. About midway through our float, I capsized, fell into the river, my bathing suit top fell off, and my knees were scraped against the bottom of the river.
Read More...My AYA Experience
Time. The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future is regarded as a whole. The issue with time is that it never stops. It keeps going. On December 21, 2021, I received life-changing news. At 1:32 PM, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and time moved even faster. I was on the brink of being a certified teacher at 29, but instead, I had to fight for my life.
Read More...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...Loneliness and Isolation
The worst part of the Cancer journey is not all the side effects of treatment and pain from procedures and surgeries, it’s the isolation that is sometimes necessary and the loneliness that comes from no one truly understanding how it feels.
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...