Women for Healing and Networking assembles women of various faith traditions to help us find unity. I spoke to the group about healing the various cancers in our lives. I compared my cancer healing journey to the different cancers we find in locally and globally, noting that the traditional ways we have been treating physical cancer have worked at the superficial level for decades but do not get to the root of the disease, and thus often recur. The same applies to the cancers in our society. We’ve been talking about some of the same societal diseases for a long time – such as racism and sexism - and pretending that we’re making advances by treating them in the same traditional ways when the truth is we are not progressing. If we are committed to healing our society, we need to move beyond our traditional remedies; they do not work.
I ask all of you reading this to pray with me that by Easter, also known as Resurrection Sunday, my physical body will be restored and show no evidence of cancer. That has happened before on this journey and I have full faith that it will happen again. I’m draining the swamp so I can get there.
Buffalo, New York was the setting of the first lap of my cancer race, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute there held the baton during that lap, which lasted just under a year. Being a complete novice to the world of cancer, it was the doctors and nurses there who introduced me to its complicated terrain. The words of one physician in particular are still embedded within me to this day. He told me that as a result of my cancer diagnosis, I would now be receiving a plethora of advice and recommendations from numerous doctors. However, and these words were key, he stated that I did not have to do what any of them said. He let me know that this was my journey, and that I was ultimately in charge of making all the decisions pertaining to my treatment.
Cancer. What do you think of when you hear this word? When I was growing up, and even as a young adult, I never thought much about cancer at all. If I did think about it, it was because I’d heard about it in a movie, or on a television show, or somewhere far away. It had absolutely nothing to do with me or my life, or anyone close to me. On November 27, 2000, that forever changed when I was diagnosed with stage 2B breast cancer. I was 33 years old.
