Taryn Hillin

The world feels like a crazy place right now. A new virus is ripping through the global population and, for the time being, seems upstoppable. A vaccine is roughly one year to 18 months away. All we can do to protect ourselves is hide, wash our hands, and hope for the best. We have to believe that should we catch it, we can beat it — after all the death rate sits somewhere between 1% and 4% (since total population testing is not happening we don’t have enough data to say for sure). Not too bad right?

If I could sum up cancer in one word I would say “sacrifice.” As any survivor knows, cancer takes a lot from you and in order to live you must pay a hefty toll at the sacrificial altar of survival. We sacrifice our time, our jobs, our sex lives, our money, our hormones, our youth, our hair, our future health, and most often our body parts. For me that sacrifice meant losing my uterus, my ovaries (goodbye estrogen, hello menopause), my cervix and one third of my vagina.

This is ME and that’s my bald head! Cancer sucks — but it’s also an incredibly interesting journey. So it’s no surprise that I often get asked “What’s it like to go through chemo? What does radiation feel like? What do you DO all day?” (which, please, ask away). In light of that, I thought I would highlight what a typical day is like when living with the Big-C and going through surgery, chemo and concurrent radiation.