lunhs cancer

Some of these ingredients may seem hard to find, especially if you are newly diagnosed. But with a little searching (and soul searching), you can create something wonderful to sustain yourself through the hard times. First, you will need three heaping cups of support . This support can come in a variety flavors, and many blend well together. The first cup includes your close circle : spouse, parents, family, friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, religious groups, community groups. These people are all around you, and are the first to jump in. Since too much support can spoil the recipe, it helps to use a website like Lotsa Helping Hands , or an organized friend to coordinate your support. The second cup is your cancer people . It begins with the medical staff, such as your doctors, nurses and social workers. I have found it enormously helpful to include the support of other people with cancer, because they know what I am going through both emotionally and physically and can serve ...

Having stage 4, incurable, metastatic, terminal lung cancer (or "eventually terminal" as my cancer buddy says) has made me acutely aware of death in a way I never expected to be at age 38. I walk in the land of the living with the oppressive knowledge of how very close we all are to the land of the dead. I know that right now my cancer is under control, but one day this roller coaster will dip down again. Will it come back up or will it be the final plunge? ~~~ People ask me how I cope, knowing how very uncertain my future is. Learning to cope has been a gradual, ongoing process. First was the shock, a frozen inability to process this new reality . Then there was the grief, the acknowledgement of my lost future, all the things I had just assumed that I would get to do and see. The plans that I had laid crumbled beneath my feet. But I realized that I couldn't stay in that mental space. I felt like I was wasting the time I had left here by focusing on my lost path. So I sto...

Cancer?!? This can't be happening. What did I do to deserve this? Am I being Punked? Is this my fault? This isn't real. Why me? Cancer. The Big C. The malady that once was only spoken about in whispers. The Voldemort of diseases. With so much fear surrounding this diagnosis, is it any wonder we end up asking, " Why me? " Why does a 14 year old vegetarian get bone cancer ? Why does a 37 year old non-smoking mom of three little ones get lung cancer ? Why would both patients be the same person? ~~~ When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, the first person we contacted (after my parents) was my pediatric oncologist . Could this be a very delayed recurrence of my osteosarcoma? Was this caused by treatment for my first cancer? Is there something about ME that explains how I got two cancers before the age of 40? A biopsy answered the first question. No, this was adenocarcinoma of the lung. A totally different cancer than my childhood osteosarcoma. My pediatric oncologist conf...

One of the things I love about reading blogs is their immediacy. They are typically written in a moment of heightened emotion, in response to a life event. They are raw. In my new adventure blogging for CURE magazine, I am going back to the beginning of my cancer journey to catch those readers up to where I am now. I am able to reflect on moments that were too intense at the time to fully process. In my first post , I talked about the terrible moment in May of 2013 when I was diagnosed with lung cancer. The overwhelming emotion at that time was shock. I felt frozen and unable to think clearly. Looking back now, I can attempt to explain what it felt like, hopefully reaching out my hand from the shore, helping others navigate that awful fog. I realized that I couldn't talk about my current adventure with cancer without revisiting the first time, twenty some years ago when I had childhood osteosarcoma. So here is a glimpse at the early days of diagnosis, the first time around. You Hav...

The first time I heard that dreaded phrase, I was 14 years old. I had taken up a juggling hobby (make that obsession) and had been practicing for many hours a day. My right shoulder had started to ache, so we all assumed it was from overuse. I tried to back off a little, but the ache continued. One evening, I was juggling clubs at The Juggling Club and I threw a high double and caught it in my right hand. I heard a snap and felt excruciating pain shoot down my arm. I dropped the club I had just caught, and the ones in the air clattered to the ground. The room full of jugglers turned to look. I gritted my teeth, smiled and said, "Oops! Ha ha, I'm just � gonna go get a drink of water," and I rushed out of the room. Once in the hallway, I collapsed against the wall and tried to figure out what had happened. I could barely move my arm and it hurt, oh how it hurt. ~~~ It was already late, so I told my mom I was too tired to go the emergency room, let's wait until morning. ...

In an exciting turn of events, I've started blogging for the cancer publication CURE. They publish both a magazine and web content, and I am looking forward to sharing my story with a new audience in the hopes of educating and helping more people who are on a cancer journey. CURE provides C ancer U pdates R esearch & E ducation to patients, caregivers, and people working in the field of oncology. The magazine has recently brought on several bloggers in an effort to give readers a more personal side of the patient experience. I'm very happy to be one of them. I'm still figuring out how I will coordinate blogging in two places, but I think I'll have some posts that are just for you, my awesome readers, and some that are for a larger cancer community on CURE, but I will provide a link to those here on my blog. Full disclosure : CURE pays me a few pennies (literally) for each person who clicks on my articles. So, if you would be so kind, take a moment and click on ...

"...be inspired and punch a hole in the wall of numbness and dumbness. And now is the time to do it. It's going to take a very strong person to punch that hole. But that person or persons will lead the way to the next place. One just sits and waits for the rumpus to begin."  - Maurice Sendak The Lung Cancer Awareness advocates have been busy! While we didn't have sports teams and cheerleaders wearing pearls or white ribbons for us, I think we had better visibility than last year. We are making progress in reaching more people, and equally as important, we are growing stronger as a community. As my friend and fellow lung cancer blogger said so well, " We may be low on funding, but we�re big on community . " (If you haven't read it before, click on that link for a wonderful post about the life-altering power of community.) There were thousands of inspiring and educational videos, blogs, stories, tweets, and articles during the month of November. Since it...