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I am almost a 7 year Breast Cancer SURVIVOR (will celebrate that landmark the last week of July this year!) I’m currently living, that is LIVING, with bone and liver metastases a.k.a. METS (small spots of breast cancer that returned to my body and pitched some tiny little tents in which to reside on these organs - tricky little bastards, those cancer cells – I’m not going to let them worry me unless they decide to go ‘condo’ someday :-). Despite the minor inconvenience of treatments I get every couple of weeks, I’m feeling great and seriously KICKING CANCER’S ASS !! The METS, first appeared in 2004, exactly five years after my first diagnosis of Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) in 1999. IBC is a rare and often difficult to diagnose form of breast cancer which is why statistics for it can be ugly. I am fortunate to not be one of those stats…nor do I plan to be. I was living in London ( England) with my husband when I was first diagnosed. Luckily, I had an amazing Consultant (breast cancer specialist/surgeon) Mrs. Margaret Ghilchik. She worked with another amazing doctor (oncologist) named Dr. Clare Vernon. Between the two of them, I had fantastic treatment. Despite the negative statistics for IBC, both of my physicians believed in my survival and so did I. To me, the secret to beating cancer or any other potentially fatal disease is a strong will to live and the faith that you can do it. Whenever I get scared or have a visit from the little green we’ll-never-make-it-we-are-doomed monster, I look him in the eyes and say, “I CHOOSE LIFE!” He scurries off then and I move on with my day. I’m planning to live a very long life and I’m still learning that I need to live in a “one-day-at-a-time” way. This Amazon Heart Odyssey is a great way for me to grab adventure, challenge, and healing with both hands and scream from the top of the mountain we are going to be hiking, “What the hell are you thinking? Are you nuts?” And my voice will echo the sound of my soul off the rocks, “Yes, I hope so!” My passion is comedy: I perform stand-up, I write (jokes, scripts, etc), and I laugh at life on a daily basis. Please donate to my fundraising efforts here so that Amazon Heart can keep helping people like me heal and help others. Love and blessings, Brandi
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