A Journey to Joy
- Model and mother of two Christine Handy was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2012.
- She was 41 years old, and the news came as a shock.
- Handy underwent more than a year of chemotherapy treatments and multiple surgeries.
- Today she devotes her life to helping others as a humanitarian, motivational speaker, and mentor.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer on October 1, 2012,” says Handy. “It was a very aggressive form of cancer.”
Read MoreHer friends quickly rallied around her in support. “Once they started to show up, I was more able to show up for myself,” she says.
From Helping Herself to Helping Others
Between October 2012 and December 2013, Handy spent every week in the chemotherapy chair. She had 28 rounds of chemo and 21 separate surgeries, both to treat her breast cancer and fix damage to her arm from a previous injury.
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She’d spent her life focused on herself, but her friends urged her to take another path in the wake of her cancer diagnosis. “My friends said to me, ‘When we’re done getting you healthy, once you’re back standing on your own two feet, now it’s your job. It will be your job to then go out and help other people.'”
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Handy decided to devote her life from that point on to the service of others. Today she mentors anyone she thinks can benefit from her guidance, and she is on the boards of two different charities. One of those organizations, EBeauty, provides wigs at no charge to women with cancer who have lost their hair to chemotherapy. “I was fortunate enough to be able to afford a wig, but a lot of people can’t. We’ve given out 55,000 wigs to individuals that need it,” Handy says.
Finding True Joy
Since her breast cancer diagnosis, Handy has transformed herself into a humanitarian, motivational speaker, mentor, and published author. She’s penned a fictional account of her illness and recovery, called Walk Beside Me, which was released in 2016. Plans are under way to turn the book into a film called Willow.
As seemingly perfect as her life was before cancer, having to adapt to the challenges of the disease has somehow made it even better. “I went from being very self-involved…to serving other people,” she says. “And ironically, I went from living a very happy life to a very joyful life.”
She reflects back on her life pre-cancer. “I was happy then. I loved that part of my life. But it wasn’t until I served that I felt really true joy,” she adds. “There is so much power in uniting, especially when you unite women. When we stand with each other for months and months and seasons after seasons, then really we’re unstoppable.”
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