Heidi

"Inspirations through people"

When I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 41, I found it was people who inspired me in many ways. I offer these tales in hopes that they will inspire you as a patient or supporter. My husband and I decided to include our family and friends through a telephone tree and group emails. We were profoundly moved by the love and support which came back to us. Each and every card, phone call, email or visit was a warm connection which enveloped me with a reason to live. A few days after my surgery, as the fear of cancer sunk in, there was a night nurse who always seemed to arrive at just the right time. At first, she told me "It's okay to be afraid." and later she said "If you believe in God, trust Him, he'll take care of you." And that was the beginning of my spiritual healing.

A few months later, I met a woman in the infusion center who told me about a yoga class for cancer patients. Through this class I was able to find my body again and make it my own. After several years of fertility treatments and then cancer, my body and I had become strangers. It was important to reconnect. I also found other survivors in this class and through them more resources including a support group which helped with the emotional processing and learning to laugh my way through some of this.

Then I was given a gift certificate to see a massage therapist and it turns out she had been an oncology nurse. She told me that I could choose to be a survivor. That some people hold cancer at the end of their arm as though it is a heavy coat on a hanger and it takes all their energy to hold it there. She encouraged me to put the coat on, learn to live with cancer, so the rest of my energy could be used to heal. She has been so right. At another visit she told me that I have will power I can use to survive, I just needed to find it. Again, she was right.

I also found inspiring people in books, some by doctors (yes, MDs) who wrote that patients can use their mind to heal their bodies (my initial favorites were Bernie Siegl's Love, Medicine and Miracles and Mehmet Oz's Healing from the Heart for cardiac patients). Since there aren't a lot of ovarian survivor stories published, I sought out survivor stories from any cancer and found Lance Armstrong's book It's Not about the Bike and Joni Rodger's Bald in the Land of Big Hair, which also made me laugh.

These are just a few of the ways in which people have inspired me with their stories of survival, the healing they can offer me, and the simple encouragement to find my will to live. I was told by a friend's mother that I would be a new person a year after diagnosis, one I could not imagine. I am indeed a new person today, a more complete person healing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I am a survivor. You can be too.