Cancer(?) Update

Below is a note my daughter, Rachel, wrote. She is amazing!


"I want to give a cancer update, even though it's no longer a cancer update as my updates have been in the past.

This summer my mom was declared cancer free by her doctor! Cancer free after months of chemo and radiation - the cancer has gone bye-bye! I am so proud of my mom, who has come out of this a fighter. She has come out victorious and been an amazing example to me and, I'm sure, to everyone around her.

Next month, it'll be a year from the night I got the worst phone call of my life, a year from the night my mom told me she had cancer. This has been a year of tremendous growth. So many blessings have come out of it. One of the big ones is that it has brought my extended family together. I think we all got a wake up call of how important family really is - how important having a support system is.

The race for the cure was in Portland the day after I left for Seattle, so I didn't get to walk with my family. That was hard, because I felt like it was such an honor to be able to be on Team Strong and Courageous (my mom's team), but I didn't get to experience it with everyone. I was glad the leadership conference kept me busy, because, like I said, not being able to be there with all my family and celebrating my mom's accomplishment was... hard.

Tonight we had a worship night in Moyer, it was wonderful. We sang songs talking about how we are broken people, and that we need God to console and complete us. We sang about how great God was. How we would live to love Him. How we need Him.

Whenever we sing songs about brokenness or hard times, I think of cancer. Cancer broke me. Cancer gave me hard times. I hate cancer. But, God consoled me. He gave me strength, He gave my mom strength, He gave my family strength.

Ok, but here's the deal. The cancer is gone, right? Wrong. It has infected my family forever. I am cancerous.

But it does not control me, I am the one in control.

It is going to be a part of my life until the day I die.

I am always going to remember the year of my life when I had to fight cancer.

I will probably always have a small amount of fear that what happened to Mrs. Dowd will happen to my mom; I will always have the fear that the cancer will come back.

I will always avoid soy milk and tofu. Wait, there's a reason. It's because they accelerate estrogen production, and my mom's cancer was a result of some sort of estrogen imbalance. So I will always avoid those foods. Always. Maybe that's unnecessary, but I will also always have the fear of someday getting cancer in the back of my head.

I love this quote: "A woman is like a tea bag: you never know how strong she is, until you put her in hot water."