Raya’s First Pregnancy. She’s due June 19th, 2024, and was confirmed pregnant with more than one.
Our baby princess Raya is all grown, and currently expecting her first litter of puppies due June 19th. We’re so excited for her, and for the families who will take her puppies home!
It’s been ages since I’ve done much in the way of writing about my cancer journey here, but it’s time to start writing again.
A snapshot of my cancer and faith journeys, and the bridging of two worlds into one centered around God.
If there's one thing I've learned over the years as a cancer survivor, and just one thing I could say or one piece of advice I could give to cancer survivors everywhere who might be struggling in these challenging new lives as I had been, it's that the best way to survive cancer is to live the best possible life that you can.
The death of lovable actor Robin Williams was both untimely and tragic, and shocking to so many. What a great man and a great actor, probably one of the best in Hollywood, loved and adored by many millions of fans. His passing is a great loss, and to learn that he had been battling a very deep depression and that his death was an apparent suicide just made it hurt that much more. Although Mr. Williams was not known to be fighting cancer of any sort, depression is something that commonly finds its way to cancer fighters and survivors, and sadly neither of these topics are strangers to me.
Last week on July 16th, Stuart was awarded the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the ESPY Awards, ESPN’s annual awards show. I can’t even tell you much about any of these awards or their meanings or histories, but I can tell you all about Stuart’s acceptance speech because it blew this cancer survivor away.
At the start of 2014, after suffering from a year of such terrible anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress, I finally had my life figured out again after cancer. I was in the midst of this moment of clarity where I had an intimate understanding of all that had gone wrong in my cancer survivorship and why, and all that had gone right as well. I couldn't afford to let this moment of clarity go to waste, because never again in my life did I want to suffer as I had throughout so much of 2013, hurting as I had been, yet not knowing what to do. After four months of writing, I finally released this essay into the world, and was happy to see it spread far and wide. If you only ever read one thing from me, let this be it.
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