Season of Hope: A RFL Story

Good afternoon, Adventurists’! I hope your holiday season is full of fun and laughter! And excitement for a new year! Today, I wanted to do a video for you about an event that is near and dear to me, Relay for Life of Second Life. This year I’m blogging for one of the Megaevents, SL Christmas Expo… and let me tell you, I am having a blast! I love Christmas season! All things Christmas from Holiday décor to celebrating the Birth of Christ. The holiday season is important to me because, as a cancer survivor, each new season is another year of life that I have. So I was very excited to be accepted as a blogger for the SL Christmas Expo this year!

For those of you who don’t know, Relay for Life of Second Life is a big event that consists of several months of fundraising for cancer research. It is an event that was started in May of 1985 by Dr. Gordon “Gordy” Klatt. He was the first to walk and run a track for 24 hours to raise funds for the nations highest health concern… Cancer. His 24-hour grueling walk and run a marathon around the track started an event that’s lasted all this time. Today, there are thousands of teams all around the world who walk for Relay for Life in the real world. And in Second Life, there are over a hundred teams of people, as their avatars, who get together as a team and work hard through the season to raise funds for cancer research around the world. It amazes me every year how many people are involved and how everyone is from all over… people from England walking (like my brother, Kermie) to my sister who is in Arizona to people from my team who live in Germany and France and even Hong Kong and other areas…all getting together to walk the track for Cancer research. It fills me with pride that my team, UFS Team Metamorphosis, has so much support from around the grid…volunteers from members working on the team campsite every year to members running events through the season… everyone gathering and working hard to raise the funds to support the members who have cancer or who had cancer… or members who are caregivers to someone with cancer. We all have our journey story, including myself.

I’ve talked about it on my blog before, but I’ve never vlogged about it. I hope that I don’t break down in tears in this part, but if I do, please forgive me. Even though it’s been ten years, I am still affected by it.

My journey began in 1999 when I found nodules on my thyroid. I was gaining weight, no matter how much exercising I did. I had the symptoms of a thyroid disorder but I didn’t know what. At the time, I had no insurance so I was on the UMAP program in Utah, where we lived at the time. The doctor sent me to a specialist to have my thyroid nodules biopsied and an ultrasound performed. Of course, all she did was do an ultrasound. She didn’t do the actual biopsy. Her reason was there were suspicious hotspots indicating cancer but since I didn’t have insurance and was on public health assistance, they wanted to “cut costs” and put me on medicine instead to “control” the “issue.” I was put on thyroid medicine and the nodules shrunk and I started losing weight again and hair growing back, no dry skin anymore, etc. Fast forward to 2006, when the doctor in my old town said I didn’t need the medicine…she didn’t understand that the doctor with UMAP was controlling the nodules and cancer growth WITH medicine and she insisted that I didn’t need the medicine… about three months after she took me off the medicine, I started having problems breathing again…my nodules began to grow back enforce! By the time she sent me to a specialist, she had insisted I was lazy and that’s why I was tired. She insisted I go on a diet, even though the diets didn’t cause any weight loss…by the end, she had tested me for diabetes and other issues, until she finally felt the biggest nodule and decided I was right after all and sent me to a specialist! My specialist found 11 nodules on my thyroid…two of which were cancerous…I was sent to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, where I ended up having two surgeries to remove my thyroid and six weeks later I had a radiation therapy. All of this took around a year to get help for after my nodules started growing back… 11 years in total from the 1999 ultrasound until diagnosis in 2007.

I had Medullary and Follicular Thyroid Carcinoma. The lesson I learned is it’s my body. I know when something is feeling off with it. I may not know what is feeling off, but I know something is off. And when a doctor refuses to listen to you, then it’s time to move to another doctor who will think outside the box and figure it out. I had all these symptoms and my doctor told me I was being lazy when in reality, it was my body telling me something was wrong. I was lucky. My cancer didn’t kill me, but it does leave me susceptible for other forms of cancer like blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma from the radiation therapy in my future. It’s a higher risk than others have, not a for sure thing, but still, it’s always in the back of my mind in some way.

This is why I relay every year. I relay for my family and friends who cared for me during my surgeries and afterward. I relay for my mom who supported me through it all. She took care of me after my surgery and still does to this day when I have to deal with after cancer medical issues. She is a rock, even though I sometimes become frustrated and upset, she still supports me. I relay for my RL brother. He stayed in the hospital with me and slept on the couch after my surgeries with my mom. He didn’t have to do that. He and I don’t always get along, but he stayed with me and that’s what a caregiver does…even if he didn’t put ointment on my neck for the scars, he still stayed with my mom and me after both of my surgeries and he also went with us to all the doctor’s visits prior and after while he was at home. I relay for all of my friends who are going through cancer now and their caregivers. I relay for cancer research. I relay for everyone to have more birthdays. I relay for those who passed from cancer on my team. I relay for those who are fighting cancer now on my team. This is why I relay.