Survivor

Inspiration   >  Encouragement and Support   >  Survivor

New York City, February 14, 2003. I should have been out with friends or better yet, with that hot guy from yoga class. Instead I was at the doctor’s office, lying on a exam table while a nurse passed an ultrasound scanner across my belly. Sure, I’d come in with muscle pain, shortness of breath, abdominal cramps. But I figured I just overdid it partying at the Sarasota Film Festival, where a film I was in premiered. Showing off for that guy in yoga class probably didn’t help.

So why did the nurse have a seriously distressed look in her eyes? I asked her what she saw. "You’ll have to speak with the doctor," she said.

Something was very wrong. The doctor told me what they’d seen on the ultrasound: Swiss cheese. The surface of my liver was covered with so many tumors, it looked like Swiss cheese. What was going on inside my body?

My panic grew over the next few days as I had a biopsy, blood tests, body and brain scans. Finally a specialist explained they’d found 10 more tumors, in my lungs. My dad, mom and younger sister were there with me when I got the diagnosis: epithelioid hemangioendo-thelioma. EHE is a rare and incurable sarcoma. Cancer. In my case, it was in the lining of the blood vessels in my liver and lungs.

I was only 31, an up-and-coming photographer and actress. I was always working—taking other people’s headshots, going on auditions. Just a few weeks ago I’d starred in two Bud Light commercials that aired during the Super Bowl. How could I have cancer?

It seemed so unreal. I didn’t look sick, I didn’t feel sick. Since I was asymptomatic, the specialist recommended a "watch and wait" approach.

No way could I casually sit on a time bomb. "Is there anything I can do?" I pleaded.

"Just try and live a normal life," the doctor said.

How? How could I live with cancer without thinking of dying every day?

"If you want to, focus on building your immune system through diet and lifestyle," he added.

I could do that! I could educate myself and help my body out! He’d thrown me a crumb of control, and I grabbed it.

I made a little sacred space in my apartment. I covered a table with pictures of my favorite people, candles, my grandma’s rosary, shells from a beach I wanted to see again, a rock from my mom’s garden. I plopped a pillow in front of it. Every day I sat there, giving myself pep talks, saying prayers. I probably looked like a whack job, but I was learning who I was, finding my inner voice.

What it was telling me was, I needed to totally renovate my way of being. There wasn’t enough time and energy to be an actress and fight for my life, so I quit my job to become a healing junkie. My idea of nutrition had been what to eat to whittle away my figure for acting jobs: PowerBars, ramen, coffee, fat-free this, takeout that. Now I had to learn how to eat to nourish my body. Many books and seminars (and some liver flushes, fasts, herbs, supplements and certification programs) later, I gravitated toward a raw and living foods approach to cleanse and repair my body.

To strengthen my attitude and spirit, I looked for books or movies about young women with cancer. But everything was geared toward either kids or people much older than me, and most of it was really sappy or depressing.

Cancer needed a makeover, and I decided I was just the gal to do it. I began writing and filming my journey. I documented everything and everyone. The video camera was my buddy. I talked, it listened. It made cancer a project. It made me an artist, not a victim; a director, not a patient.

Still I longed to hear stories from other women. I wasn’t into support groups, though. (In truth, I was too chicken.) So I called everyone in my address book and asked, "Do you know any young women with cancer?"

I got connected to women who understood me in a way no one else could. Cancer Babes, I call them. Some of them even let me film their stories for my documentary, Crazy Sexy Cancer. Was I being flip with the name? No. I didn’t want to lose my sense of humor just because there was something really serious in my life.

By August, I needed a break. My best friend and I took a trip to New Mexico. Inward Bound is what we named our spiritual adventure. We went on daily pilgrimages to churches and monasteries and took in lectures and workshops.

One day, walking through the Santa Fe Indian Market, I came upon two little girls chasing each other, their laughter bursting through the air.

"My heart is jumping," one said to the other. "Is yours?"

"Yes," I said softly. "Yes."

I watched them twirl and spin, wondering what would happen if I let go like that. Maybe my heart would jump so high, it would shatter everything that was holding me back. Maybe everything I needed for the light to shine through was inside me. Maybe if I could learn to quiet my mind, I could move mountains!

That sense of possibility must have been what drew me to a Zen monastery in Santa Fe called Upaya, because meditation had never been my thing. Those last five minutes of yoga class, where you meditate, were torture. Yet something about Upaya beckoned me.

My first evening of meditation there, all my emotional junk came pouring out in a flood of tears. It was embarrassing. But it felt good to release the weight I’d been carrying. That night, coyotes sang under my window, and I slept like a baby.

As the weeks went by, I meditated, took classes, did chores to maintain the monastery. And I blossomed. Beneath my junk lay a wealth of healing potential. I even learned to quiet my mind for more than four breaths!

The one class I tried to get out of was called Being with Dying. The name alone gave me the creeps. The class started with a writing exercise: What’s the best-case scenario for your death? The worst-case scenario? What do you have to let go of so that the best case can happen? Within two sentences, I was staining my paper with tears. I got it: This class wasn’t about dying, it was about exploring the emotional sandpaper that made living so raw.

That night, I fed my writing exercise into a bonfire. I watched the paper disintegrate into ash, imagining my worries and fears and tumors doing the same.

I think all that emotional release opened me up to meeting my soul mate. Brian was an acquaintance, a writer and film editor I asked to help me shoot and edit my documentary. Pretty soon we were together constantly, 16-hour editing sessions full of creativity and laughter.

I knew I was really falling for the guy when I tried to protect him by breaking up with him. "This is my burden," I said. "You have your whole life ahead of you. Find a healthy chick and be normal."

He refused. "I love you, and I’m staying. Let’s take it one day at a time and work with what we’ve got, okay?"

The life I have today is amazing! Brian and I got married and moved upstate to Woodstock, to a little house in the woods. The future has an anchor now. The EHE is stable, not growing. Cancer is no gift, but for me, it was a catalyst. It gave me the freedom to dump my baggage, to take risks, to really live. For the first time I don’t want to play a role, pretend to be someone else. I’m thrilled to be me. A free-spirited, take-charge woman full of sass and fireworks. A survivor.

This article originally appeared in Guideposts magazine. Visit the recently updated guideposts.com today.