Good morning Everyone!
What a glorious day to be alive! I am so thankful for some of the people I have met along this journey they call cancer. Today I would like to tell you about some of them.
I have found that in the face of diversity; people really find the internal strength to face tremendous adversity and still thrive! Two women have given me encouragement, wonderful examples; and the best gift of all…friendship.
Ashley is a young woman who lives in the Washington, D.C. area who has Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Yes the bad stuff that took Steve Jobs from us. Its a very painful cancer. She’s young and recently married to her childhood sweetheart Tim. Everyday this girl tackles life and is out there living. Last weekend she raised almost a million dollars for pancreatic cancer research in ‘the other Washington’! She did a 5K fun run! And this girl is very sick. She has been briefly in and out of the hospital lately for things that would have killed us! Yet she continues her work as a cancer research advocate. And she takes time to answer people’s comments on her blog which she writes almost daily.
She makes me feel exhausted when I read her page which can be found by searching CancerKickinGirl on Facebook or just type it into google. And did I mention she is beautiful? She is beautiful on the outside but also on the inside. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us” (Emerson) and Ashley is an overall beautiful package. Please take time to read her blog.
I am so thankful to have met her. I don’t even remember how it happened but she’s been in my life for at least six months now.
The other woman I want to comment on is Ann Silberman from Sacramento, CA who writes a blog called “But Doctor, I hate Pink”. Her blog won the 2012 Health and Wellness Blog. She is stage IV breast cancer and for me, has been a wealth of information. Ann is married with two sons and strives daily to survive to stay in their lives and eventually see her son off to college. Her blog is uplifting, inspiration and at times very hard on the ‘pink’ community! I have gotten to know that alot of breast cancer survivors hate the pink communities. I won’t even go there this morning.
Both of these women, and so many other women and men, out there are fighting this horrible disease as best they can. You probably have someone in your life that you know and probably don’t think about to often because you think they are doing fine. Take some time out of your day to do ‘something’ for one of them. Every little is appreciated more than you can imagine and is important more than you know. The little things you take for granted like being able to pick up your dry cleaning or even take your dry cleaning out; would make their day better.
And a phone call is an easy thing that you can do. To just have a smile in your voice and let them know you have their back!
I hope you all have a good day and that someone always has your ‘back’!
Bonnie
