Chocolate for a Woman's Soul Volume II by Kay Allenbaugh

Author:Kay Allenbaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength

in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important

whether I am afraid.

CAROL LLOYD

Do it Like a Survivor

Pushing our bodies to their limits overwhelmed us. Yet, the cancer survivors training with us were serene. What was their secret?

This morning I am one of three thousand women shivering at dawn at Chase Palm Park in Santa Barbara, California. The sky is the same color as the sidewalk, gray and silvery with points of early light piercing the fog. A fine mist settles on my cheeks. The exhilaration is contagious, and my stomach feels the excitement. We are about to begin the Avon 3-Day Breast Cancer Walk.

As I trained for this event, my mantra was, “fifty-five at fiftyfive”: fifty-five miles at age fifty-five. I had raised two thousand dollars for the cause. My training goal was to walk twenty miles in one day.

But for weeks I couldn’t reach that goal; in fact, I couldn’t budge past nine miles. My back throbbed and my knees swelled. Walk after walk I tried to get beyond that limit, but I was crashing against a locked door. Invariably I gave up, staggering home, defeated.

For moral support, I joined a group of twelve women who had also signed up for the Avon Walk. Our ages ranged from sixteen tosixty; our occupations were diverse. Two were breast cancer survivors determined to regain physical strength. The rest of us were family and friends of survivors.

“I feel more balanced now that I’m flat-chested,” one of my companions, Melody, announced the first morning. Surgeons had removed her second breast fifteen days earlier. That day she walked five miles with a drainage tube still in the incision. Although she wasn’t as fit as the rest of us, she never complained. When I asked her about tolerating pain, she spread her fingers, palms up. “Pain is a part of life.”

Melody behaved as bravely as my lifelong friend, Donna, who had also overcome obstacles: Years ago she lost a baby in her ninth month of pregnancy; at the same time her husband left for military duty during the Vietnam War.

“I have a lump in my neck,” she told me one afternoon. The next day it was two lumps. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, an often-fatal cancer of the lymph system.

Thirty-one and the mother of two children, Donna saw the disease as another of life’s setbacks, another obstacle. She had no intention of leaving her children motherless.

“I separate my mind from my body,” Donna told me during her radiation treatments. “As my body gets weaker, my mind grows stronger.” Tenaciously, she focused on strength and health. She described her mind as “a well of positive energy.” The energy level in her “well” got low at times, but it never dried up.

Courage like Melody’s and Donna’s was typical of the cancer survivors I trained with. Several of them couldn’t walk the prescribed number of hours or days suggested by our guides. Yet, the

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