What Would You Share With Your Younger Self?
- In their first-ever meeting, four women opened up about survival, vulnerability, and the power of community as part of SurvivorNet’s Breast Cancer Dialogues series, which is designed to help patients feel less alone and more empowered on the road to healing.
- In a segment we call “Portraits of Resilience,” breast cancer survivors Anna Crollman, Irene Hong, Amy Knowles and Amanda Butler reflect upon images of themselves taken at various stages of treatment. In an intimate group setting, the women take turns vocalizing the feelings that these images evoke, sharing what they would say to their younger self going through cancer.
Dubbed their “Portraits of Resilience,” these visuals serve as a powerful reminder of what each survivor has endured. All individual, unique experiences, yet with one major thing in common: resilience and strength.
Read More‘Everything Is Going To Be Okay’
35-year-old Amanda Butler, founder of Cancer Baddies — a vibrant, unfiltered support network for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers around the world — spoke to a picture of herself in a hospital bed before her double mastectomy, wearing a blue surgical cap around her bald head. Butler, surrounded by five other women — including episode host Alison Hall and Dr. Danielle Seidman, a breast medical oncologist at NYU Langone Health — immediately brought up the “five strands of hair” on her head at the time, and the “three eyelashes,” she added half-jokingly.“I was really scared. I was really nervous,” Butler recalled of the moment.
“But now being on the other side after my fourth surgery, I just want her to know that everything is going to be okay, that life is always working out for you,” the fitness coach continued, speaking to her former self in the frame.
“And even though that this is a hard season of life, everything is temporary, and just as this moment is fleeting, this moment is fleeting.”
A Beautiful Love Story
Amy Knowles, 59, showed the group a photo of herself and her “dear husband” Brian, “who I’ve known since we were 18.” They married when Knowles was 33.
“Here I am, 46 in this photo, and this is my first walk wearing my survivor sash,” she described of the American Cancer Society “Making Strides Against Breast Cancer” annual walk in Central Park, which Knowles has been a part of since 2005, years before her 2012 diagnosis.
Honoring that “young lady” going through cancer, “I thank her,” said Knowles, who is an Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Admissions at NYU’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing
“I thank her for her courage and her inspiration to me now, because I often will go back to where I was bright-eyed, new. And I never want to lose that feeling when I’m talking to someone newly diagnosed.”
“So I say to her very similarly, all will be well,” Knowles added, expressing good wishes for the “incredible survivors around me, my family, my dear husband Brian, he has been with me on every [charity] walk. So I say to this young lady, we did it, and you will do it.”
“And keep on keeping on. Stay healthy, stay strong, make good choices,” urged Knowles, who adds that her “survivor” photo is even more special to her than her wedding photo. “It’s this photo that really speaks volume to the love and dedication that Brian and I have for each other.”
‘I Promise This Is Not Forever’
Irene Hong, 37, a New York City native and strategic finance professional, reflected on a snap taken during her eighth chemotherapy treatment session, “my four-hour infusion.”
“I’m wearing a head scarf, I had to get creative with my bald spots,” said the stage 2 survivor.
As for what she would say to that person in the photo, “I mean, I would just tell her, you can do the hard things, and I promise this is not forever. It will get better.”
Hong said that she uses these same uplifting words to encourage new breast cancer patients. “And it’s true,” she reaffirms.
New Light After a ‘Dark, Intense Cloud’
Creative marketing professional and content creator, Anna Crollman, 38, looking at her image as a newly-diagnosed survivor, said, “it feels really surreal to look at this woman. It feels like now that I’m a parent, it almost looks like I’m looking at her as a child,” the mom of two boys added.
“There was so much that she didn’t know yet,” the lifestyle creator and My Cancer Chic founder pondered out loud.
“How am I going to make surviving worth it?” she remembered thinking. “So I would tell her that you have all the time in the world to figure out what you want to do with your life.”
A common reality for many survivors, Crollman recalled struggling with the unknown about her fertility. “She still didn’t know whether she would ever have kids. And so also reminding her that we have two sweet babies now that are our world,” she added.
Though Crollman said her cancer experience “was very scary and traumatic at times,” she wanted to remind her younger self “that there is this light on the other side, it’s just going to take us a little while to get there. And it’s okay to be sad and depressed and really be struggling right now.”
“That’s so beautiful,” said host Hall, who then pulled out her own framed photo of herself, smiling wide in a surgical cap, and reflected on her own survivor story: “I would tell her that we did it and that it’s a long journey and this will always be with you, but it gets better. That’s it, ladies.”
Content independently created by SurvivorNet with support from Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.
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