A Thirty-Year Contract with Survival​

On April 20, 1995, my life fractured. I was twenty-nine years old, holding a newborn, and diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin lymphoma. I entered treatment at a hinge point in oncology, benefiting from therapies that were changing what survival could look like. But my story didn’t end when remission began. The treatments that saved my life kept their own receipts, and decades later I began living with the consequences of the medicine that gave me a future.​ 

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The Armor of Simple Wisdom

To survive a road that long, I leaned on the Christian faith and plainspoken “isms” I had been given long before I knew I would need them. At the heart of this memoir is a question that reaches far beyond cancer: How do you stay grateful for what saved your life when that same thing keeps taking pieces of it? Cancer may be my story. That question is everybody’s territory. Inside these pages is a story about resilience, acceptance, faith, grief, gratitude, and learning that even when we cannot choose what happens to us, we can choose what we do with the life that remains.