Attitude can play a huge role in how someone handles a cancer diagnosis. Linda Levin, a multiple myeloma survivor, says she never — for a second — thought that she wouldn’t be able to live with the disease.
Linda was first diagnosed in 2016. She was starting to feel tired all the time, but for awhile she chalked it up to being super busy at work. When she started to feel intense pain in her pelvic area, she decided it was time to consult a doctor. “They assigned me to an oncologist and she looked at my numbers, and she said, ‘You have multiple myeloma,'” Linda says. “I said, ‘What is that?’ I’d never heard of it before.”
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Linda had to have a transplant. She says she had some really unpleasant side effects during treatment, but she prepared for them, and found ways to entertain herself throughout treatment . She spent a lot of time making jewelry with friends. “Fortunately I had a really good group of friends and my family were around me,” Linda says. “It made it a lot more palatable … I never said I’m not going to survive this. That was just never an attitude I took.”
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