THE WALKING WOUNDED
Timing is everything. I have been obsessed for the last few months getting a book ready to publish about life after breast cancer. In fact, that is ALL I have been doing. I have the publisher, am having the site built for the survivors and have been two weeks now recording the audio version of the book.
Right now I am busy looking for sponsors for the project. I thought the writing and reading were the hard parts. No, it is the raising money from sponsors or donors. BUT I woke up way too early this morning to find that the three big network anchors were TOGETHER in one interview, announcing they were bonding together to fight the cancer issue until we find a cure for it. Each and every one of them had lost at least two family members to the disease.
It is taking over the world right now. I feel like I have been put in the right place at the right time.
However, with no better option available, the focus is just to pour more and more money on the problem until a cure is found. My thought, though, is that I have never heard a single word about the lack of funding being the problem. I feel so strongly about this, it is hard to be objective. Naturally, I want the American Cancer Society to be funded for whatever scientific method is out there. And I feel in my heart it will happen. But the fact that it hasn't happened yet is probably not for lack of funding.
The focus of what I have written is about life after breast cancer because from a personal standpoint, that is what I know about. I know about the devastation these women and their families feel when they learn they too have breast cancer. THEY need support. They (we) represent the experts on how to recover from this if we are given a chance. Those are the WALKING WOUNDED. There are millions who need help in coping. The feeling has been if you are one of the lucky ones and survive, you don't need any more help. So, my efforts are to help the ones regain a life and go on stronger than before. It always impacts families and finances as well as quality of life.
What is more urgent to me is that there are so many people with no insurance and therefore not offered all that is available to those with proper funding. Those too are ones I would like to help. There will be a method in my project for donations to be made for these people. There will also be a way to pay tribute to those that didn't make it and have their stories told if the family would like. This was prompted by hearing from one of my best friends in Orange County this week and learning that her daughter had just died from breast cancer. I am more convinced that I survived for a reason.
One of the things I am working on right now is validating the use of natural herbs in fighting the disease. I have been collaborating with a young woman who had had a radical mastectomy in her late 30's and had been given all the chemo, multiple surgeries and still given only a month then to live. She opted for treating herself just with herbal treatment and that was 13 years ago. I think that may be better news than perhaps we have found even in the medical field. Unfortunately those herbs cost her over $10,000 and none of it covered by insurance.
Now I can get off my band box and get back to work. I am glad this much national attention is being paid to the subject and am sure it will also bode well in the promotion of my own book. People are going to be helped here.
Sorry about this being not the least bit humorous because that is usually my M.O. but you will find some humor in the title of this book. It is "Tit Tatts: Life After Breast Cancer." (smile here) I am a piece of walking artwork but as far as the world knows, I have no scars!!