Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor's Soul by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online Page B

Farber and get through this transplant for her as well as for me. I know that if she could have gone through what I was about to, she would have done it willingly if it meant she would live. When she died, people worried about me, but I told them all that I was going to gain strength from her death because she was an inspiration to me when I was diagnosed.
    While I would never want to go through a cancer diagnosis again, it does not seem so frightening to me now. I have learned that you can battle cancer and win. Although cancer is terrible, for me it has also been a blessing. I am stronger and better now. I have so much self-confidence and faith in myself now. I now know that I can do anything. I can face anything that is thrown at me. I just have to face it head on and take it one day at a time.
    It has been almost 18 months since I had my last radiation treatment and I feel great. Greater now than I have in a few years. At times I feel so great, I am almost euphoric, like I am walking on air. It is wonderful to be healthy again. When I was diagnosed, I felt like most people who are diagnosed with cancer. I felt like I had just been handed a death sentence. Cancer meant death, but now I know differently. You can survive breast cancer.
    Kimberly A. Stoliker

Cancer and Career Choices
    D iscovering the ways in which you are exceptional, the particular path you are meant to follow, is your business on this earth, whether you are afflicted or not. It’s just that the search takes on a special urgency when you realize that you are mortal.
    Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
    At the tender age of 27, I had been married for six years, enjoyed a flourishing career in the food service industry, was about to buy my first home and was the delighted daddy of two beautiful and remarkable children—a boy and a girl.
    At age 43, I was two years divorced, owned a prosperous small business, was in the process of purchasing a new domicile, had found love again and was on the verge of remarriage, thus becoming the proud papa of two more adorable children.
    Fifteen years later, the children are all grown up and still wonderful, but all else is gone—marriages, homes, businesses. However, I am now a successful real estate salesman, secure in the knowledge that given time I will recoup all.
    Now let me sort out my list of things to do: continue making loads of money, find Ms. Right, buy a new home, raise a new family and I’m complete, right? Not! I will always believe that at this point, in my thinking, God threw up his hands. “Enough already! What do I have to do? Strike my child with lightning? Wait, I’ve got it—a life-threatening illness will point him in the correct direction. Either that or it will kill him. What to do, what to use? Cancer, that’s it, cancer. But what kind? Not just life– threatening, also a threat to his manhood; he’ll heed that. That’s it, prostate cancer. I am all-knowing.”
    I can come up with no other answer than that Divine Providence generated my urge to get a complete physical, and my additional need for reassurance that I wasn’t losing my manliness—okay, okay, potency—led me to discover I had a diseased prostate. Further tests indicated the cancerous condition was operable, but if I did not take decisive action and allowed the cancer to spread, I would be counting the months I had to live and those days would be filled with more hospital stays plus painful, debilitating treatments. My doctors explained all the options—at least the ones medical science had to offer— but the best one seemed to be complete removal of the offending organ. I would not be the natural father to any more children, since it is the prostate gland that produces semen, which carries the sperm. I could live with that— literally. Additionally, any of the curative options could possibly render me incontinent, even impotent. Just what I needed to hear, but I could live with that, too.
    At this point, I must mention that we all