Type of Sarcoma: Highly Undifferentiated Endometrial Sarcoma
Date of Diagnosis: 2009
Location: uterus
It all began for me in the oncologist’s office in 2009. I got the paralyzing message … there was no cure for the highly undifferentiated uterine sarcoma. I sat terrified and in shock. I didn’t even know what to ask. She told me I had end-stage cancer with the most aggressive type of cells. What do you do?
Sound familiar? Remember thinking, if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, it feels like a death sentence?
First thing that hit me—I’m a mother. What would happen to my school-aged kids? Because the sarcoma was so rare, the doctors didn’t have much to offer.
At that point I knew I needed to do everything I could to survive. That meant I needed to use everything the doctors knew about, and much more, just to stay alive.
So I began my journey through two years of chemotherapy and three major surgeries. The cancer was relentless; it kept coming back. After my final lung surgery, guess what news I got? Get ready for hospice. Like my life was over.
Yet during those two years of treatment, I also went through an enormous personal makeover. I unwittingly did what many stage-4 cancer survivors have done. I went into remission through a process I now call the ABCs of healing. I had changed my attitudes, my behaviors, and made major life choices. This brought healing to my heart and my mind… and my body followed.
I’ve been in radical remission since November 2011, free of evidence of disease and free of cancer treatment.
In 2014, I received the Voices of Women award for outstanding achievement in personal growth and transformation from Whole Living Journal. This year I earned an Unsung Hero award from Cancer Family Care.
My friends urged me to use my journalism background to write a book about how to heal one’s life. That’s how Thriver Soup: A Feast for Living Consciously During the Cancer Journey was born. My website is http://thriversoup.com/.
