Here, I begin riding through my journey...

Today, I woke up with the realization that I am fighting cancer for the third time.

After two years of remission, the cancer is back.

Let me start from the beginning. I am a 40 year old, happily married wife of seventeen years. 

I have raised two amazing daughters and am blessed to have my nurturing mother at 76, live with us. Because of these four people in my life, I have survived cancer twice.

In 2004 I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, with no signs at all, it came out if nowhere. This led me to a radical hysterectomy and a ten day hospital stay. One week later, I got the wonderful news telling me there was no more cancer! No additional treatment was needed. At that point, I did not feel worthy of calling myself a " survivor". After all it was just a surgery, I did not endure the effects of chemo and radiation. I saved that credit for all those warriors fighting "real" cancer.

One year later, on the night of my 14 year wedding anniversary, I noticed a small lump below my collar bone. Two days later  I got the phone call from the doctor telling me the needle biopsy results showed that I had cancer. This time it's pretty serious since they did not know what kind of cancer it was. After a surgical biopsy, bone marrow biopsy and PET scan, it was determined I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma. 

All I kept hearing was, how lucky I was to have the "good cancer". What the hell does that mean? The word, good and cancer could not be in the same sentence, right?

I decided to have the treatment in a private medical clinic with an amazing doctor. She held my hand through the entire process and became a "friend" I could count on. I choose the Stanford 5 therapy and radiation. This would be 12 weeks of weekly chemo treatments and 4 weeks of radiation therapy. The hardest part of all was telling my two daughters that I would be sick for awhile. They took the news pretty well, but were not happy to hear I would lose all of my signature waist long hair. Neither was I.  

In February 2006, It was finally over and I was in remission. Now I could finally call myself a 

true survivor. I went through it all and managed to" kick the ass" of the disease!

After 2 years of three month check ups, I had finally graduated to six month check ups. Well, I never made it to my first six month check up. I noticed another "lump" on my neck. Oh, please let this lump go away. After three weeks, I decided to have it checked. Another needle biopsy, this time with  no results,  a PET scan was ordered. There it was, another dreaded phone call from my doctor saying, "evidence" of re-occurrence. It is back, now what?

I have my fist appointment Monday, May 18th.