How I stayed positive and strong during cancer

I hear a lot of women talk about an epiphany that they may have had during cancer or cancer treatments and I’ve just always been an upbeat person, so, for me, cancer wasn’t going to stop me from living my life. I still went out to breakfast, lunch and dinner with my dad, I still went to church. I went through Christmas, I went through New Year’s, and I went through my birthday. And I went through my birthday bald! And I’ll tell you: I’m cute bald. I have the cutest little round head and it just didn’t stop me from living my life.

You get on this mission of “I’m going to beat this!” And you go through the motions, you go through the steps. I had a hair shaving party, and my boyfriend at the time shaved all my hair off. But before we did it, he turned it into a Mohawk, and it was just absolutely hilarious. We did little things like that that gave me empowerment and gave me control of my own situation. I had a party before I had my mastectomies and that was incredible. We had a good-bye party to the breasts and it was great. So there’s little things like that that you continue to do and if you were a powerful person inside before cancer, you’re going to carry that through your treatments and you’re going to be just as powerful, if not stronger, even after your treatments.