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.
Human beings are creatures of habit. We stick with what we know, even when it's hurting us, or even causing us tremendous amounts of pain. It's only when the pain that we experience finally far exceeds our fear of the unknown, that we cast ourselves off, and this is exactly what it looks and feels like to do.
When I started volunteering as a blogger for Kim Jone and the Testicular Cancer Awareness Foundatio back in 2014, I did so because I was inspired by the story of Jordan Jone, loved the energy of the Jones family, and their dedication to their mission of spreading awareness about testicular cancer. It just felt like the right place for me to be, and putting my energy into. Never in a million years did I dream or imagine that just a few short years later, we'd all be saying goodbye to Jordan like this.
As I look back on 5 years of cancer survivorship, I've started to see from a higher level just how much I've evolved every year since cancer. We evolve constantly throughout our lives, perhaps too slowly to notice on a year-to-year basis, but we're always evolving. Having cancer as a young adult is a massive accelerator for that evolution.
A silver lining is a consolation prize, or something that's second best. Why settle, I told her? If you're going so far as to try to find a silver lining, why not just try to find a golden one? So long as your hearts and your minds are fully open, you'll find what you're looking for, so why not try to find something even better?
Do you have any idea how hard I've had to work to find happiness through the chaos and turmoil that cancer had brought into my life? I'm not just "happy" in my life today by accident. I've had to work on it for years, working through layer upon layer of pain, and rooting out the demons within me at every level.
Cancer is a whole new reality, a whole new set of life circumstances, and a whole new set of challenges to adjust to that requires growth, change, and evolution. Chances are, you're NOT going to get everything right the first time, and that's okay. Keep retooling and readjusting your life until you have the right people, the right approach, and the right philosophy for life that can take you to the next level.
By far, the biggest physical challenge I've faced after cancer, is that of chronic fatigue. After months of being poisoned almost to death by harsh chemotherapy drugs, irradiated trying to nuke cancer cells out of existence, or having our bodies ripped apart and then sewn back together, our bodies are just plain tired.
In Part 1 of these essays, I described what posttraumatic stress felt like to experience, and in Part II, I described the various things that I did to cope with and recover from it. In this final essay, I'm sharing the things that I've done to manage my life after suffering from posttrauamtic stress after cancer.
The passage of time without any new evidence of disease is the only way that we ever get to "cured", and that makes for a very challenging waiting game in our years after cancer. Nothing has been more terrifying to me during these years than the fears of recurrence, and every strange pain or irregularity in our bodies brings these fears to life.
I wrote my reflections on reaching 5 years since my cancer diagnosis in advance on my personal blog, "Five Years Ago Today...", so that I'd have something to share on that day, but until that day came, there was no way to know exactly how I'd feel about it. I was shocked at how I felt when I woke up that morning as a newly minted 5 year survivor of cancer, because honestly, it felt like I had just woken up from a terrible dream, and it was wonderful.
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