My Top 4 Cancer-Fighting Heroes

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My cancer heroes are probably not who you think they are going to be. That’s the way I like it! Everybody has to have role models to strive for, and these are my top 4.

Angelina Jolie4. Angelina Jolie

OK, this one’s pretty obvious. While Angelina didn’t have cancer, it runs in her family and she has lost loved ones to it. I think it really took courage to choose to have a double mastectomy when she is in an industry that is so focused on physical attractiveness. I love how she is using her celebrity status for good – for bringing attention to not only breast cancer, but how women can take control of their own health and be strong. I know several people who have gone through breast reconstruction after mastectomy, and it is no picnic. Angelina shows women that you can still be sexy and strong, breasts or not.

Tig Notaro3. Tig Notaro

Tig is not as well known as Angelina, but I hope she becomes more well known. She combines her personal cancer experiences with the power of humor to produce a compelling stand-up act that entertains and awes at the same time. There is so much out there about Tig within googling distance, but this bit from Mother Jones describes her well:

One evening last August, comedian Tig Notaro sat at home in Los Angeles, wondering what she’d tell the crowd at the Largo club. Five months earlier she’d fought off pneumonia only to be waylaid by a gut infection that siphoned 20 pounds off her scrappy frame. Then her mother died and her relationship crumbled. Through it all, she had managed to keep people laughing, but a diagnosis of stage II breast cancer the day before had left her at wit’s end. When the solution finally dawned on her, she couldn’t stop laughing. That night she bounded onstage, waving: “Good evening! Hello. I have cancer! How are you?”

Way to go! I used to work in the surgical unit of a regional trauma center. Sometimes the only way to survive is by “black humor”. You have to laugh or you will cry. The audio of the original show is now on iTunes. If you are a survivor, it’s the best $5 you will ever spend.

Willie Nelson and Kristi Seehafer2. Willie Nelson

As far as I know he’s never had cancer. Kudos to Willie Nelson for his work with NORML, The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Willie actually knows that he’s one of my heroes. We met a year ago after a concert, when I told him very briefly about my chemo experiences and thanked him for his work with NORML. I have to admire a guy who is so willing to stick up for his beliefs to the point of arrest. You can disagree with me and Willie all you want, but the fact remains that my special brownies helped way more than any pain pills when I was at the height of my bone pain during chemo. Yes, a good girl can break the law now and then.

There is really no good reason why medical marijuana should be illegal. Period. End of discussion.

I also told Willie about my 4th hero, Barbara. She couldn’t thank him for those brownies, but I could.

1. Barbara

Lastly, my biggest hero is my friend Barbara. I’m sure she knows that I love and admire her, but she’s no longer around for me to ask her if it’s OK to use her full name.  I have a picture, but I’m not posting it. Barbara and I were on the same chemo schedule, so we often chatted through the fog. One of her favorite subjects was her granddaughter and her granddaughter’s dog, Sweetness.

Barbara had already been fighting colon cancer for over a year, and she was going to continue her fight for almost a year after I was finished with chemo. I had quite a few special brownies left, and I decided I was going to give them to Barbara. She loved to eat, but it was a problem for her due to her multiple colon surgeries. She was so happy to have them!

Several months went by, and since I no longer was on any schedule, I rarely saw Barbara, but I had heard from the nurses that she had finally decided to quit fighting. The nurses said she wanted to talk to me, so they gave me her phone number. When I called we chatted for a bit, and she asked if I could get her more brownies; somehow the previous batch had all “disappeared.” Living in East Nashville, it’s never really difficult to find the herbal ingredients necessary for such baking, so I made a batch and took them over to her. She asked that I call first so that she could get out of bed and get to the door. When I got to her house, she was very obviously in pain and in her final days. She told me she wasn’t feeling well enough to chat, but perhaps when she felt better I could come by for a visit.

That was the last time I saw her. I got busy with work, because we were just about to go to Carnegie Hall. Just after I got back from New York, I woke up in the middle of the night with the sudden feeling that I needed to check the obituaries. Sure enough, Barbara had passed about a week earlier, and her service was while I was in New York. When I spoke to her son, he said that the brownies were a great help to her. That was all I needed to hear.

Barbara encouraged me to never give up. She taught me to stay positive – to not let cancer get the upper hand. She fought with grace, and made her final decision to quit fighting, at the age of 73, with grace. She never lost her sense of humor.

Here’s to you, Barbara.

How I Got Here

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Kristi Seehafer

I had hair in 2006!

In the next few posts, I’m going to give you a bit of background about how cancer got me on the track to personal and professional growth. I want you to know who I am, where I’m coming from, and where I’m going.

I’ve played the violin for 43 years. I’ve been a professional for well over 25 years, playing hours every day. That’s a whole lot of muscle memory, and over the years I had created a finely tuned system of tendons and muscles that did whatever I wanted them to do.

Until my surgery. The lumpectomy wouldn’t have been that bad, but it was the lymph node surgery that really caused some problems.  That was on the left side, the side that holds the violin.  On the right side, the bow side, was the port surgery, and that surgery also cut through some vital cables and pulleys. When I went back to work I was a mess. I couldn’t hold up my violin for more than a few minutes at a time. Just before my third chemo treatment, my port broke and I had to have another one put in. After that, my doctor took me out of work for the rest of the season due to the repetitive motion on the port side. (Gee, sounds like a yacht.) I’m glad I had opted not to do any reconstruction, because the typical reconstruction surgery takes flaps out of the back, and that would have ended my career.  The other option was belly flaps, which might have been great for tummy tuck purposes, but it would have left scars up and down my stomach and I wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight for a couple of months at least. No thank you.

All that to say that I was a physical mess and I was worried about my professional future. I wished I had put some other sources of income in place before I got cancer. (And if I’d known the winning lottery numbers I would have played them, right?)

While I had just started going back to school to become a physician assistant, it was going to be an arduous two years of part time and full time schooling. After my diagnosis, that just wasn’t going to work anymore. There was no way I could afford health insurance without a job, if I could even get it. It was going to be difficult to be a 55-year old woman starting a new career anyway, but a 55-year old cancer survivor? Who would hire me?

Chemotherapy

No hair, 2011

And this was all before I started chemo. Chemo was the real game changer for me. How many of you out there came through your treatment realizing that you just didn’t want to put up with the usual BS anymore? Going through any kind of crisis makes you realize what is really important in life, and for me it was difficult to come back to a profession that was high stress without a lot of personal fulfillment. At least that’s the way I saw it. I had always wanted to be a violinist and play in a professional orchestra, and I’m one of the lucky few who beat the odds to do it.  I think I’m pretty damned good at it too. But being in an orchestra is not like doing any other job in the real world, and I’ve had plenty of them.

I decided that I needed to find something that fed my soul, rather than sucked it dry. All the meditation I did during my chemo was going to do me no good if I didn’t actively try to find a better life. Part of my new philosophy was that I wasn’t going to be the “good girl” anymore. Hey, I was already a bit of a hell raiser, but when the chips were down, I fell into line. No more! Some of my new philosophies:

  • If something is wrong, I’m going to say so.
  • I’m accepting responsibility only for what I’m responsible for. If someone else messes up, it’s not my problem.
  • I’m going to be positive; if you want to be negative, fine, but I’m not joining in.
  • Do it TODAY (does not apply to mowing the lawn or washing the dishes.)

This may be old news to many, but in the music world plays by different rules. I had a lot to learn about personal growth and development, and this was just the start.

I’d love to hear from you.  How did your cancer experience affect your job and your life? How did you change after your diagnosis and treatment?

See you on Friday!

 

The Big C goes down!

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When I decided just a few days ago to focus my main blog on my experiences with breast cancer and how it changed my life, I had no idea that right here in Nashville a group of women have started an organization focusing on that very thing! I didn’t even realize that June 2nd was National Cancer Survivors’ Day, and I totally missed it.

nwsc-logoThe National Women’s Survivors Convention will be held at the Opryland Hotel August 22-24. This is the first event of the Women Survivors Alliance, which was founded by Karen Shayne and Judy Pearson.

From their website:

Our Vision:

To transform survivorship from a mood into a movement by empowering, educating, and connecting women whose lives have been touched by cancer.

Our Mission:

To establish a network where women affected by cancer can find their voice, improve their quality of life, and embrace their new normal.

Head ShavingWe are all winners!

It’s time that we cancer survivors, male or female, embrace the fact that, as Judy says, we are winners, not just survivors. We beat the Big C, and for the vast majority of us it has thrust us onto our own unique paths of personal growth, spiritual growth, personal change, and self-improvement.

In the days to come, I will speak more about me and my personal experiences, and also give you tips about how to start on the path to creating your best life possible. For many people, including myself, the initial diagnosis is a horrendous and life-altering experience which, once lived through, becomes a blessing in disguise.

When are you a cancer survivor?

I had the honor to be asked to speak last October for a breast cancer event at Vanderbilt, and one of the other speakers asked me when I considered myself a survivor. I honestly had never considered it. You can be certain that insurance companies have a vastly different definition than we do! After I gave it some thought, I told her that I considered myself a survivor as soon as I heard the results of my biopsy. For me, I would accept no other outcome.

So, welcome to my new blog! There are some older posts on here that really do belong here, and because I haven’t been blogging long, I just decided to keep everything.  I’ll announce my other blogs as I get them up and running, but let’s just say I have a lot of different interests, and a lot of things to say. And after beating cancer, I don’t care who knows it!

 

 

 

Blogging 101

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I'm blogging thisIt’s obvious to me now that I haven’t yet found my voice. This blog WILL change drastically, but I’m just not sure how yet.

It’s difficult to find a voice when I have so many different interests and areas of expertise. Do I write about my musical life? Do I write about my needlework? What about being a cancer survivor, or triathlete, cookie baker or runner? For any blog to be successful and fun to read, I have to know who I want to appeal to, and if I’m trying to appeal to everybody, I’ll appeal to nobody.

There is so much to learn about writing blog posts, headlines, and link descriptions. I’m rapidly realizing that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to avoid all those English Composition classes back in my school days! But at the same time, the internet is making information so much more available, and I can always learn something new. In addition to writing, I have to learn about search engine optimization, e-mail lists, web hosting platforms, you name it.

One of the great sources I’ve found is The Renegade Blog. Blogger and trainer Eric Walker writes,

Ditch the jargon, and just be clear.

You don’t need to be persuasive if you can communicate clearly.

Here’s an example of an unclear, full of jargon, makes-no-sense tagline:

“Revenue-focused marketing automation & sales effectiveness solutions unleash collaboration throughout the revenue cycle”

Ugggh!

You didn’t understand what that meant just like I didn’t understand what it meant.

The point being: avoid fancy, woo-woo language; avoid complicated business-like language; avoid over the top hype-filled, cliche-ridden language.

OK, so that I can do. Now all I have to do is find out what to write clearly ABOUT. Stay tuned!

 

Monday Madness: Mark Twain

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MarkTwainWell, maybe not madness, but I do enjoy starting Monday off on a lighter note. Why Mark Twain? I think he is one of the world’s greatest writers and humorists. We could use more humor in the world right now.

He was my go-to guy when I was going through chemo and I wanted to laugh. What would Mr. Clemens have thought of the state of the union today? How would he have used the internet? What would he have had to say about the Tea Party, or the Occupy movement, or any of the social issues that divide us today? We can get a pretty good idea:

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

But my all-time favorite quotes of his have to do with the German language. I was raised in a very German area of the country. There were still church services in German, and I remember my grandma gliding into German on the phone when she didn’t want us to understand something. (And most of the time, she’d been listening in; if you are under the age of 50, do a Google search on “party line.”) I studied the language in high school for 4 years, and I even claim to have a minor in it at the college level. Good lord, I spent several summers in Austria, where my attempts at communication improved only with wine. But can I speak it? Hell no. And Mark Twain explains why:

A dog is “der Hund”; a woman is “die Frau”; a horse is “das Pferd”; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is “des Hundes”; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is “dem Hund.” Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is “den Hunden.” But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they’ll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he’ll think he’s an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don’t like dogs, but I wouldn’t treat a dog like that- I wouldn’t even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it’s just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the’s and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn’t recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it’s goodbye cat. That’s about the amount of it.

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don’t know how I got in and can’t find the way out, but I’m having a booming time all to myself. Don’t know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn’t have the question settled for anything in the world.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it’s all together. It’s downright inhuman to split it up. But that’s just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

I hope you got at least one chuckle out of this to start your week off right. Auf Wiedersehen!