Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Hello, my name is Jana, AKA Starshine, and I welcome you to this episode of how to Cancer.
[00:00:17] I am going to be talking about surviving survivorship.
[00:00:22] My experience comes from surviving melanoma skin cancer. I was stage 2B and I had an ulcerated mole that was basically like stage three. So I had to do treatment for a year of immunotherapy, and I suffered adverse reactions to the treatment. So surviving my survivorship has been a very big challenge. So. So I thought that maybe I have some advice I could share.
[00:00:59] I think everybody's experience has been different in the cancer world. Everyone that I've met has a different cancer, has a different stage, has a different treatment. Everybody's different.
[00:01:14] So I thought it was kind of interesting.
[00:01:19] I have correlated my experience to an onion.
[00:01:26] Yes, Onions are pungent, yet sometimes they're sweet. And that's survivorship. Right?
[00:01:37] Cancer is the skin of an onion. I mean, you don't know what you're gonna get. You don't know how many layers to the onion, to your experience you're gonna get. You don't know how dense the onion is. You don't know how thin the layers are, how thick they are.
[00:01:57] It's all just different.
[00:02:00] So how do. How does anybody survive anything? You just make it through the day. You make it through the week, the month, the year, and you.
[00:02:13] You do what you have to do, right? We all have done it, and we all keep doing it. The trick is to do it happy, to do it with passion.
[00:02:27] And I found my passion and my happiness at Epic. I went to a camp and I was introduced, reintroduced to fun.
[00:02:42] I was reintroduced to play, and I found my happiness.
[00:02:47] And after that, it was on me to keep finding that happiness and bringing that joy to myself.
[00:02:57] So I tried my best to reinvent play in my daily life.
[00:03:05] And I live in the now.
[00:03:10] I can't live tomorrow. I can't live next month. I have to live today. I think we all know that that's kind of our lesson learned with our onions.
[00:03:23] So we don't know how many. How many layers we have. So let's just live now.
[00:03:29] And I color every day in a coloring book.
[00:03:34] I do yoga. I do mantras every day.
[00:03:41] I'm a Yogi Satnam.
[00:03:44] I definitely find grace in every day, just being grateful for living.
[00:03:54] I try to eat healthy, and by giving myself nourishing food, I feel better.
[00:04:01] I try to exercise.
[00:04:03] I try to be around positive people.
[00:04:09] I think that if you can do anything for yourself, it's to be around groups of people that are positive and are encouraging.
[00:04:22] Epic Experience is that community for me. So I volunteer.
[00:04:28] I do anything and everything that epik needs. Thank you. Cards, regional days, the gala's coming up.
[00:04:38] Anything that they need. But I also crochet, which gives me something that I can do on a daily basis. And I donate my fiber arts to groups that need it.
[00:04:49] There's my cat in the box.
[00:04:53] There's humane societies that need blankets for cats, that there's chemo sweets that need chemo caps for chemo patients. There's all kinds of places that need help and need things that maybe you could do. It feels so good to just give something to somebody, and that's how I survive.
[00:05:19] So that's my best advice for. For anybody that's going through, has gone through cancer, has gone through treatment.
[00:05:29] Survive today.
[00:05:32] Be in the now.
[00:05:34] Have a passion for living however you can, whatever that means to you in your daily life, whether it's with a pet, the people that you have, if it's just you, you know what you need, do it.
[00:05:52] Make yourself happy.
