Tag Archives: Cancer Survivor

Reconstruction. Picture This.

Posted on by | Reply | Posted in Quality of Life, Reconstruction

My children love building bricks, building blocks and manipulatives.  They will painstakingly work on designing them according to the instructions to insure that they look exactly like the picture on the box.  When they get knocked over and shattered and pieces lost, after their anger and frustration, they go back to work.  With missing pieces, I’ve still seen them make great designs.  It may not look like the picture or the ideal image that they had, but it still looks good.

I have to continually make sure I keep this in mind.  Breast cancer and life reconstruction – physical, spiritual, financial – may not look like the picture I once had in my mind.  As I’m rebuilding, I haven’t always followed the “instructions”.  But, I’m still (re)building something phenomenal!

Melanie A. Nix – Triple negative breast cancer survivor.  Resilience Coach, Reconstructionist™ and Health and Wellness Advocate.  Always striving to color outside of the lines when defining my new normal.

In My Lifetime

Posted on by | 2 | Posted in Access to Care

In my 46 years, I’ve seen many positive changes that I didn’t think I’d see and couldn’t imagine years ago.  I remember my grandmother and other older relatives commenting on advances and progress that they thought they would never see in their lifetimes and now I’m living the same thing.  I hope I live through at least one more.  But, here are a few that I’ve experienced:

  • Typing – I’ve moved from using a typewriter to an electric typewriter to a personal computer to a laptop and now a tablet
  • Telephone – I’ve gone from the big yellow (or green) phone on the kitchen wall to a cordless phone to a wireless phone
  • Computer memory – I’ve gone from saving college papers on a floppy disk to using a USB flash drive to saving my documents in the cloud
  • Listening to music – I used to listen to music on a boombox and then a Walkman and now an iPod
  • Watching movies – I used to watch movies at home on Betamax and videotape and then DVD and now you can watch movies on Blu-ray

In my lifetime, I’ve had the opportunity to live through many changes and advances.  As Vice President Biden leads the Cancer Moonshot Summit today with the goal to “double the rate of progress toward a cure”, I hope that this collaboration and new approach will allow me the privilege of expanding the list of progress and change that I’ve lived through.  I hope that I can say to my children and grandchildren that there used to be the dreadful cancer diagnosis, then there were cancer treatments and therapies and now there’s a cure.  I’m grateful to President Obama and Vice President Biden for their commitment to the Cancer Moonshot’s goal and I hope that I can say that cancer is cured in my lifetime.

Melanie A. Nix – Triple negative breast cancer survivor.  Resilience Coach, Reconstructionist™ and Health and Wellness Advocate.  Always striving to color outside of the lines when defining my new normal.