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life is what happens when you’re making other plans

Teaching Your Kids to Deal with Disappointment

I know that one of my jobs as a parent is to teach her how to deal with disappointment – but not like this; this isn’t what I had in mind. We should be working on learning how to gracefully accept that she gets what…

Advocacy

The Big C and Me: My Cancer Story

My cancer story: a collection of my blog posts and articles about my battle with breast cancer.

Living with Cancer

Normalizing – in a good way

“People give you 3 months to mourn, and a year to have cancer, then they expect you to get back to normal.” I don’t know where I heard this quote first, but I’ve experienced the truth of the statement both in terms of mourning and…

Cancer

Courage Night

I have been invited to participate in Courage Night, an author event sponsored by the Young Survival Coalition where 5 young survivors of breast cancer will read from their books, followed by a book signing.

Cancer

Harmony Hill

I’ve spent the past two days working on a couple projects that have had me knee deep in photographs from the Young Survival Coalition. That’s had me a little emotional, to say the least: memories, faces, friends… One of those projects a presentation on our…

Advocacy

Recalled

My boobs were recalled while I was breastfeeding. And you can bet I lost a lot of sleep over how many cancer cells my baby ingested from breastfeeding before I knew I had cancer.

Cancer

Letting go of the illusion of control

I like to think of myself as having superpowers. My favorite superpower is the ability to make things go away by not believing they are true. I’ve had a lot of practice using this superpower; I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer while I was still breastfeeding my baby.

I have a lot of practice using this superpower, but not much success.

One of the first things that hits you over the head with a cancer diagnosis, after confronting your mortality, is the understanding that you are not in control. Control is an illusion. That is a very difficult concept around which to wrap your brain.

Cancer

It’s Not the Same

Yesterday I spent the day manning the door at a wine-tasting representing 16 different local wineries. Every year, this event chooses a different charity to which the proceeds are donated. This year, the beneficiary was the Seattle affiliate of the Young Survival Coalition, which supports pre-menopausal women…

Cancer

My Chemo Buddy

My favorite chemo buddy, Gem, accompanied me to my Herceptin infusion on Friday. We also brought along a horse (of course), and some coloring materials. I made several attempts at taking a picture of us together where I didn’t look stoned or have my eyes…

Family

How a scary looking kid helped me get my head screwed on straight

The first night I met him, he glared at me then leaned back a ways before slamming his head down on to the table. That thud of skull connecting with wood was so hard it made the walls shake and the windows rattle. I choked a bit on my heart, and my stomach churned with that nauseous fear that comes when everything is wrong. Very, very wrong. What were we doing with this kid in our home?