About Me

This is the truth:

I am an unexpected cancer survivor – it wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  But it did and I was diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkins Lymphoma at 36 years old.  I was 21 weeks pregnant at the time of diagnosis.  My treatment plan included a combination of chemotherapy (intravenous and intrathecal) and radiation – all the while delivering a baby.

Throughout my cancer treatment and care I had good experiences and bad experiences – and I’ve learned over time that these experience aren’t what I actually remember.  In fact, my memory consistently proves to be the quintessential unreliable narrator.

This is the dare:

To tease out enough truth from my experiences and write about the feelings and the impacts of what happened just a few years ago.  I have these snapshots of time, these remnants of memory bringing me back to what I saw and how I felt as I underwent cancer treatment.  I don’t remember everything fully, or in its entirety – all I know to be true is that I received chemo and radiation and I had a baby, and that I came out of it a different person than I was moments before diagnosis.   These writings are my way of connecting the dots in reverse to forge meaning from my experiences.

Each sketch is written in the same spirit and vulnerability I experienced during my treatment plan: with absolutely no guarantees and not knowing where things would go. Intentionally, the unpolished rawness of this sketchblog style mirrors the reality of my experiences — sometimes frantic, sometimes uneventful, sometimes dark, sometimes hopeful, often messy, always imbued with the courage of simply showing up for life and its unforgiving curveballs.

I invite you to follow me.  I want to stir you, and thus connect with you in ways I can’t when I see you and talk in person.  My wish is that you feel a connection to your own mortality, your own vitality, and have a moment where the preciousness of life lives deeply in your stomach like it never has before.  The truth is that life happens in the the small moments between the big news, the diagnoses, the traumas and the triumphs. The dare is in its progression and its entirety, as I search for meaning and reshape cancer from my point of view and sketch with curiosity and delight in as much as the subject matter and my heart allows.