January, 18th 2025: Join us for food, drinks, dancing, and author sharing — all to support our mission. Learn more here!
AYA Cancer
Supported and Surrounded
I sat on the crisp white sheets of my friend’s bed, scrolling through my phone. Suddenly, my face felt wet and my hand pulled away from my nose, covered in blood. I sprung from the bed so as not to sully the new sheets, dashed to the sink and stuffed paper towel after paper towel in my nose.
Read More...Let Your Grief Help You Find the Light
“People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you’d have.”
Read More...Coping with Colon Cancer
In July 2021, my doctors declared me NED, which means no evidence of disease! Suck it, cancer. I feel super lucky to be joining a new group of warriors: cancer survivors. I am six months post-chemo and surgery after battling stage III colon cancer for nearly eight months.
Read More...Business As Unusual
It is hard to resume
business as usual
when you’ve watched the clock’s hand
move toward midnight
as flesh
Cancer and Surviving
The year was 2010; when I was 11 years old, I was diagnosed with cancer. I saw blood that was dark “wine-colored” red in my colostomy bag (which is basically a bag that has to drain the intestine), while I was waking up from my long night’s sleep in my hospital room.
Read More...The Ceiling and a Faux Pas
Today is my sixth out of 21 radiation treatments. This is to prevent the recurrence of my stage II triple negative breast cancer. I get up on the table and the two ladies direct me to scooch downward for my head to meet the headrest.
Read More...Stop Telling Me Everything Happens for a Reason
“Everything happens for a reason,” the well-meaning cashier tells me. Before October, I would have believed her. I thought that tragedy was all part of God’s bigger picture, and that we were all just pawns in the game of life, and bad events just give someone a stronger testimony.
Read More...Finding Faith in Foundation
I was at a birthday party in Rochester, New York when a woman I had just connected with started asking Muggle Questions. Normally, Muggle Questions run the same gamut after I so much as reveal the finer details of my health history: how did you find the mole? (It was smack mid-line in the center of my chin).
Read More...Moving Through Anger
The Summer of 2018 I began grasping at straws, in search of something permanent, unchanging — while my entire world was shifting constantly after my diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Read More...Letting in the Light of Religion
The year was 2015. I was 29, about to turn 30, and had big plans for the future. I was finishing up my master’s degree in Jewish Education and Communal service, essentially nonprofit management in the Jewish world, and I was getting my ducks in a row to move to Israel.
Read More...