Eleven Years Later — I Am Cancer Free.

A journey through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, grief, and the quiet courage it takes to finally let go of the last pill.

I have been sitting with this moment for a while now, trying to find the right words. The truth is, there are no perfect words for something like this — only honest ones. So here they are:

I am done. I am cancer free. And I am still figuring out how to feel about all of that.

Eleven years ago, I was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer — one that moved fast and did not give me much time to catch my breath. What followed was a road I would not wish on anyone: surgery to cut it out, chemotherapy to chase what remained, a month of daily radiation treatments, and then more chemotherapy every three weeks for an entire year. When that was finally behind me, I began a decade of anti-cancer medication — medication that had to be changed three times because my body reacted so severely to it.

The final medication has left its marks on me in ways that are very visible, very daily, and very real. Significant bone loss. Severe, relentless sweating — the kind where I walk across a room and my forehead is wet, the back of my neck dripping. My legs swell with edema so persistent that my regular shoes no longer fit. I have high cholesterol as a result, managed with yet another medication. These are not small inconveniences. They are the quiet price tag of staying alive.

That hesitation was not weakness. It was eleven years of lived experience reminding me that this disease was no small thing. When you have faced something aggressive and relentless, being "done" does not feel like the finish line you always imagined. It feels complicated. It feels like relief wrapped in uncertainty. It feels like standing at the edge of something new and not quite knowing whether to leap with joy or hold your breath.

I want to be honest with you, because that is what this community has always been built on. This journey was not just physical. Cancer affected me deeply — mentally and emotionally in ways that were, at times, devastating.

The illness arrived during one of the most heartbreaking seasons of my life. The year before my hospitalisation, I had lost my mum — a woman I loved with my whole heart — and that grief sat on top of everything else I was already carrying. I was also, at the time, deep in the relentless pace of a career I had poured myself into entirely: years as an Art Teacher in the public school system, where giving everything was simply what you did.

The cancer stopped me. And somewhere in that stillness — painful and unwelcome as it was — it asked me to look honestly at my life. I found my way to Dr. Gabor Maté's book, When the Body Says No, and it cracked something open in me. The connection between the self we suppress, the stress we absorb, and the illness that eventually surfaces — reading those pages felt like someone finally putting words to something I had known in my body but never had language for. It changed how I understood not just my diagnosis, but myself.

The grief, the workaholism, the unrelenting pace — none of it caused my cancer in a simple, direct way. But I came to understand that my body had been speaking for a long time, and I had not known how to listen. The cancer forced me to learn.

I battled severe depression through all of this. It became so consuming that I was hospitalised in the Psychiatric Ward of a major hospital in my province. That is not a detail I share lightly, but I share it because it is true, and because I know I am not the only one who has walked through that particular darkness alongside a cancer diagnosis and profound personal loss. If you have been there too — or if you are there now — I want you to know you are not alone, and there is no shame in how hard this is.

The road back from all of that — from illness, from grief, from the version of myself who did not know how to stop — has been one of the most defining chapters of my life. It has shaped, in profound ways, everything I do and everything I offer the people I am privileged to serve.

So yes — today, I am celebrating. I am celebrating life, tenacity, the extraordinary medical team who stood by me, and the quiet resilience that somehow kept showing up even on the days I was certain it had run out. I am celebrating my mum, too, and the love she gave me that I carry forward every single day.

And I am also being honest with you about the fact that "done" comes with its own kind of complexity. I will continue to have monitoring appointments. I will live with side effects that may not fully resolve. I carry with me both the scars and the wisdom of what I have been through. That is not a sad thing — it is simply the full picture.

What I know for certain is this: I am here. I am cancer free. And I am more grateful than I have ever been for every ordinary, beautiful, sweaty, swollen, imperfect day.