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Some I heard, it is really encouraged all newly diagnosed patients to know and recognized
is that cancer is a very multilayered disease. There is a lot of facets to it. There is a
physical dimension where you physically fighting for your life, you are in pain, you are in
surgery, chemo, radiation, and that it is a whole battle in itself, but outside of that
there is also an emotional battle, a mental battle, and a spiritual battle that will also
rear their heads at some point in the journey and so my encouragement to my patient is to
not try to fight all those battles at the same time to take it one day at a time, but
to also not be totally thrown off when you might have the physical battle under wraps,
but then all a sudden the emotional journey becomes almost harder than the physical journey
that had before and so just to kind of be prepared for different layers to rear their
heads at different points, the rest of your life and to really surround yourself with
a community of loved ones, of friends, of other survivors, of all that ever colon cancer
survivors and that will really help depending on what stage of the journey you are in and
what aspect that could you support for. Staying strong midst of cancer has been a really interesting
journey. It started out as a teenager just having friends and having things to look forward
to. I had my whole life ahead of me and that help me keep my head out. For a long time
though when it came back in second time, I was faced with this unexpected emotional journey
that cancer brings that I had never really concurred and really even fought before and
in the midst of that I found that logging actually really helped me. I started a blog
life after colon cancer some mycolonstories.com and just started talking about stories of
my life, things that I go through because of colon cancer, sometimes funny and sometimes
not, and I found that writing it out was very therapeutic for me. It helped me realized
what I was going through what I was feeling and then gave me purpose as I thought anyone
else going through this can come across my blog and see they are not the only ones. It
is also huge way to get the ball rolling and a few other ways I found strength have been
some colon cancer groups that give me a sense of identity and purpose. One of them is the
colon club, the colon club is a nonprofit, it is a small group of people just like me
colon cancer patients diagnosed under age 50, I was 17, some of us have been 20s, 30s,
40s, but all of us totally were too young for colon cancer and we come together. We
have this group where we have this bond and we actually produced a calender each year.
This is 2013, its called the calender and I implied and was actually featured in the
2009 calender as Ms. October and just like community of other models meeting other people
who have been through what I have been through had just been a game changer for me and where
I have pulled a lot of strength and a recent discovery also is I have recently begun working
for fight colon cancer which is another nonprofit organization and they are dedicated to efficacy,
we believe that social change comes through political change and so when we are hoping
to see socially colon cancer be recognized, be screened, people in our society know colon
cancer and know the risk, we believe a lot of that will come through political change
and so where the group on the heel, fighting for policy change for medical research finding
and things like that and so working on fight colon cancer as their communication girl has
also just given me another route to use my experience to promote this cause and this
crazy thing that happened to me at age 17 that was kind of a fluke back then has actually
given me a lot of direction and purpose and I have been honored to be able to get back
and help other patients, help other survivors, and then really help us trying to find a cure.
For an interactive tool to learn more about your colon cancer and your personalized treatment
options, go to MyColonCancerCoach.org.