Cancer, Yet Cancer Again - Karen Rice

This Book chronicles an individual’s true life experiences of a head-on collision with not one cancer diagnose, but two. The first cancer diagnosis took me by surprise, first thing came to mind, “a death sentence”. By the time the second cancer came about, I wasn't that afraid, I was angrier to why me again. I've already had my turn. On the other hand, I felt if I beat it once, perhaps I could do it again. I was ready to fight and be rid of it. I did keep a small thought in a corner of my mine, that if I didn't get through this second cancer diagnose after all the fighting, it wasn't meant to be, it was my time, but I definitely was going to battle with it until the tenth round.

During this time, I truly developed more gratefulness. I embraced the experience even though it was painful, hard and dreary at times. I felt as though I was fighting for something, someone. Each time a person goes through a horrific experience, it's for a reason. I believe, after all the hurt and pain a person endures, something good has to come out of it, somewhere down the line. I read somewhere, it stated, “if you can choose to find the positive things in even your worst challenges, you'll never run out of hope”. I live and learn to believe that.  If I had not gone through cancer, I would not have known how precious life and family truly is. Yes, I've always loved my family, didn't always show it, and I sort of loved life, but it was truly hard to really know how much I loved it, because of so many challenges I had to go through, throughout my entire life. But when tragedy happens, you look back and you access your life and you see where you took all the good that was happening in your life, as well as family for granted. Good will always outweigh the bad. Every bad experience I happened upon, I got through it, and it brought me to a better and new experience, something I would not have gained otherwise. I truly believe we go through trials and tribulations to increase us, not to take away from us. With that said, and all that I've endured, I'm going to live each day as a new one. I'm going to live until, and I will not die, until I'm dead.

Through all these experiences I gain strength and encouragement to write down my thoughts to share with other. With the words and phrases of my story, I wish to make a positive impact on someone who's ill or otherwise, where they can proceed life in a whole new way. In life, we don't ask for bad things to happen to us, but when it does it brings change, and there's not much we can do about it, but to except, embrace and work through it, to see the bigger picture. While going through my cancer treatments, I was never stressed out about it, and even after I was first diagnosed, I had a co-worker come up to me and stated that “I seem to be in denial” about the whole situation. No, I wasn't in denial. What she didn't' realize is that, I had done all my crying, all the asking why, all the stressing about it, and I came to the conclusion, none of it was helping, I still had cancer. Not any of that, nor how I felt was going to make my cancer disappear, so I let go of it, and began totally depending on my faith. No denial here, just a woman working towards a different future than she had planned.

I'm a realist, I don't write to rhythm, I write what's on mind. I don't have much, I've never had much throughout my entire life, but I had what I needed. I now feel that I've been given a gift, the gift of life experiences.