Requiem for a Muse.

While I was going through all of my treatments for colon and rectal cancers, I spent a lot of time at the social networking website started by Kris Carr, my.crazysexylife.com. The site, and Kris, encourages a positive, vegan, spiritual, and passionate approach to life and living in the face of health challenges, especially cancer.

My.CrazySexyLife.com (along with it's sister blog site, crazysexylife.com) was the only cancer-related website I would go to while going through my cancer treatments (chemo and surgeries)... I didn't want to get bogged down in the fear and negativity of other online cancer forums. CSL was all I needed.

I immediately met a few other women facing cancer challenges, similar to my own. As positive as we all were, and as inspiring as they all were, not all of us made it. After finishing my treatments I fell away from the site a little. Still going back, but not on a near daily basis as I had been. I lost touch with some of my canser sisters. One of them was Stef. Stef also had colorectal cancer, but hers was stage 4, meaning it had traveled to other parts of her body. Mine had been stage 3, meaning it had reached my lymph nodes (the entryway to paths to other parts of your body), but not actually spun out to other organs.

This is the first line of Stef's profile on my.crazysexylife.com:

"I am a 26 year old mother who is married to a wonderful Marine."

Stef was a triathlete and loved to work out. There was no reason she should have been facing stage 4 colon cancer in her twenties. The headline on her page still announces, boldly:

"Today I will make cancer my bitch."

Stef and I were penpals on CSL for a while. I looked forward to her encouraging messages. She always sounded so strong and confident. I was sure she would win. One of her last messages to me was, "results were GREAT!!! 25% shrinkage in my liver!!! yippie!!! so everyone was very impressed and excited about the news!! so thanks for the good mojo thoughts! i hope your surgery goes well. let me know all the details! talk to you soon!!" That was in February of 2009.

In February, 2009 I had my last surgery, and within a few months was back at work (struggling to make it work), and trying to get back to "normal life." I lost touch with a lot of my CSL sisters, and when Stef told me she was on facebook mostly, and not so much as CSL... I took it as a sign that we were both drifting back into our "regular" lives, and didn't make an effort to connect with her anymore.

But in October, 2009 Stef passed away. While I had a book come out in February, 2010, wrote a guest blog (a huge honor for me) for CrazySexyLife.com, and got to go out into the world to enjoy the sun and air and all of life again, little did I know that Stef had gone. She was gone, but she was not a victim. She made cancer her bitch.



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