Cancer
How Do I Break the News?
How Do I Break The News? Cancer, Companionship, and Right to Privacy. Navigating the dating scene is particularly difficult for everyone, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it gets even worse when one is a cancer survivor.
Read More...Helping Others Actually Helps Yourself
Most people don’t think about the full power of volunteering. It is easy to see how the giving of your time helps the receiver, but you can’t fully understand the gift to yourself. It can take lots of time to fully reveal itself.
Read More...Don’t Be a Hero (You Already Are)
Your child was just diagnosed with cancer, and my heart goes out to you. Diagnosis day is a day forever imprinted in your soul — “D-Day” in our house: January 6th, 1999. I’ll never forget that wash of shock, fear, and utter paralysis when our daughter’s oncologist called us at home with the news: Cecilia had leukemia.
Read More...Cancer Follows Me Everywhere
I’m heading home after my first date in Boston. Normally my dating app M.O. has ten steps that include texting, phone calls, and other precautions before an in-person meeting. But something was different with this guy.
Read More...“Silenzio, Bruno!”
My mom died from pancreatic cancer three months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a short three and a half years after my dad died from AML. My husband, two daughters, and I slipped into isolation and grief through all the COVID headlines, trying to keep our heads above water through a funeral, cleaning out her house, and figuring out where the line was on being safe and keeping sane.
Read More...Supergirl
It’s Tuesday, and I’m scheduled for another chemo day. I look excited, happy and hopeful, which shows in my cute outfits for chemo, how I carry a lot of energy filming and taking pictures trying to document the entire experience, and how I just look like an innocent lady who has no idea how cruel the world can be since I am the youngest patient in the room.
Read More...What To Expect When You’re Not Expecting Cancer
Dear self that walked into the ER with abdominal pains not expecting the outcome to be cancer: First, I need you to take a deep breath. Exhale. Take another deep breath. Exhale.
Read More...The Ouch Factor
Why Sexual Pain Happens After Cancer, and What Can Be Done. If you experience discomfort with sexual activity, you’re not alone. Sexual pain happens to be the most commonly reported sexual complaint for women after cancer (Bober & Krapf, 2021).
Read More...We’re All a Little Lost
It’s the holiday season, and Santa Claus is coming ‘round… so begin the lyrics to a very cheerful Christmas song, about Santa helping us celebrate the holidays. But sitting here, in a borrowed house because my family is quarantined due to breakthrough COVID and I can’t be with them, with sunlight streaming through the window onto the artificial hyacinth, I’m feeling anything but cheer.
Read More...New Year, New Me…
New year, new me… I have always absolutely hated that saying. However, this year I literally am a “new me.” Most of my cells have been killed and replaced to generate a “new me.” Living most of six months in the hospital for intensive chemotherapy has formed a “new me.”
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