Hi. I'm a newcomer here

Everyone’s individual experience with chemo is different, even if they are taking the same awful drugs. One might lose her hair, the other no hair loss at all. One might cruise through it, seemingly unaffected, while another hangs over the toilet and comforts themselves between vomiting on the cool tiles of the floor (<- that was me). Everyone copes their own way as well, none of those ways more right than the other persons.

When things got really tough for me, I’d lay on my back in my bathroom, arms spread out to my sides, and I’d let my mind roam through all those who have said they care and are praying for me. As I remembered each individual I would relax a part of my body, usually starting at my feet and working upward as I whispered thank you. Once I was relaxed from head to toe, I’d begin again at my toes and imagine them floating off the floor, and go up my body until I felt I was floating on air. I’d whisper, thank you!

My cancer was in both breasts, lymph nodes, and my right kidney adrenal gland. And my battle is ongoing. In the middle of it my dad died of throat cancer. However, he was 74 and I needed to focus on me. So I began focusing on my unfulfilled dreams. I’d always wanted to be a romance author, so I wrote a romance book… it was published. I wrote another… it was published…and so on. I realized many of the things around me in my life were feeding negative energy at me daily, so I moved three provinces, settled into a beautiful community and took my life back. Pretty scary when fighting cancer, but the best thing I ever did for myself.

Life didn’t stop because of chemo, cancer, or fear. I channel that energy into the greater good of helping others like myself.

We all have our stories and you are just beginning this part of your human journey. How you allow it to affect you is up to you. You can be a voluntary victim and cry the blues, or already a survivor reaching out helping someone else more unfortunate than you. Every negative has a positive, every positive a negative. You can either stamp both out and achieve nothing or embrace both and fly!

I keep a copy of everything I write, and even reuse it if it applies somewhere else at another time. I also can see my own growth as I reread each writing and see more clearly the path I’ve travelled thus far. What I like I keep, the rest I throw away.

I would like to encourage each member here to not only welcome new members, but to share your story. Your story just might be the story that lifts someone else who is on the verge of giving up to go on another day. I know I'd love to read yours! Isn't it wonderful we are all so diverse that no two stories will be the same.