I am living with incurable breast cancer, and yet I have never felt more alive.
It sounds strange to say that, but it’s the truth. We grow up thinking there will always be time. Time to grow old. Time to do the things we’ve dreamed of. Time to put off what really matters. When I found out my life might be shorter than I had ever expected, I realized just how much of that time I had been wasting.
I spent too long worrying about what people thought of me. I stressed about little problems. I carried the weight of my own doubts. And then one day I just decided, enough. I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left like that.
What I’ve learned is that I still have a choice. We all do. A choice in how we think. A choice in how we feel. Some days, fear and anger creep in, yes. But I refuse to let those be the thoughts that shape my life. Instead, I choose joy, hope, kindness, and love. I wake up grateful for the day, no matter how ordinary it may seem.
But it hasn’t always been this way. For most of my life, I felt like I didn’t quite belong. Like I wasn’t enough. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, seemed more deserving of space in this world. So, I tried harder. At school. At work. In my relationships. I gave so much of myself to others that I forgot who I was and what I needed.
That’s when illness first found me. In 2012, after years of ignoring symptoms, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. By then, one of my lungs had collapsed. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I went through six rounds of chemotherapy. A year later, I was in remission.
I quit my stressful job and looked for something more meaningful. I thought of it as a second chance, and I wanted to grab hold of everything. I traveled. I said yes to new experiences. I had my daughter, Kayla. She became the light of my life.
But old habits returned. I worked too much. I tried to be everything to everyone. I ignored my own body again. Stress ate at me. My marriage fell apart, and I became a single mother. It was painful, but also freeing. Slowly, I began to find myself again.
During those years, I kept learning, about psychology, about the mind and body, about resilience. I even created a resilience program at work during COVID, something that helped others and reminded me of my own strength. I began practicing yoga, meditation, better nutrition. For a while, I thought I had built a new life of balance.
Then, the lump.
I felt it in my breast one day, hard and real. I tried to tell myself it was nothing, but deep down I knew. Scans confirmed it: breast cancer that had already spread. Secondary. Incurable.
The word “incurable” felt like a heavy stone dropped into my chest. This time the grief hit harder than before. Because now there was Kayla. My little girl. Just five years old. The thought of leaving her, of her growing up without me, nearly broke me.
I searched desperately for hope. And I found it in stories of people who had defied the odds, people who had healed against all expectations. I read about radical remission, about the mind-body connection. I worked with a therapist who helped me face my fear and taught me how powerful compassion and belief can be.
I began to understand that how I think and feel affects my body. Fear weakens it. Love and hope strengthen it. So I began practicing kindness toward myself. For the first time in my life, I stopped pushing myself beyond my limits. I let myself rest. I stopped feeling guilty for it. I allowed compassion to become part of my healing.
Science even shows how compassion calms our nervous system and boosts our immune system. That gave me more reason to keep going. Every time I rest without guilt, every time I treat myself with kindness, I am giving my body a chance to heal.
I don’t know what the future holds. But my goal is still the same: to live, to be here for my daughter, to heal in every way I can.
If my story can help others make small changes, that matters to me. I want people to remember to listen to their bodies. To check themselves. To not ignore the signs. Catching cancer early can save lives.
Most of all, I hope my story reminds others that we have more power than we think. Power to choose our thoughts. Power to rest. Power to love ourselves enough to fight for our health. Because life is too short not to.
