Why Telling Our Stories Can Be Healing

Posted August 24th, 2016

I met this amazing young woman, Sarah Thebarge, at a writers’ conference in Portland this past week when I took her coaching class, “The Healing Power of your Story.” Coaching classes are eight hours in length, spread over three days;   they include writing exercises and the time allows for some excellent in-depth instruction. This […]

Is There Anything I Can Do For You?

Posted August 9th, 2016

Spoken one way, it ends conversation and doubles the distance between me and, my friend, my tennis mentor, who now in his early eighties is dealing with a medical crisis. Spoken that way, it is nothing more than a social convention. He knows I really can’t help him, and he knows I don’t have the […]

How to Dare Greatly With Cancer

Posted August 8th, 2016

Granddaughter Lilly, a black belt in Mixed Martial Arts, recently competed in an MMA tournament and captured two third place finishes. On the way home, she and I FaceTimed and of course she was disappointed, because she has some rather nice first-place hardware in her room at home. But by the time she and her dad stopped for lunch and she […]

Rodney Warner

Cancer Center Advertising: Doing More Harm Than Good?

Posted July 21st, 2016

You see them everywhere. On TV, in print, on the sides of buses. The ads run on radio and on the internet. They’re ads for cancer centers. They cost a lot of money. Money that’s not spent to develop new cures, control the cost of treatment or improve the quality of hospital food. Someone is […]

12 Simple Ways to Get Back Into Life With Cancer

Posted July 19th, 2016

This past weekend was the annual Tour des Chutes — a multi-distance cycling event and walk/run in my hometown to help local families dealing with cancer. Founded by cycling enthusiast and brain cancer survivor, Gary Bonacker, the event has surpassed the million-dollar mark in fundraising. Which is pretty amazing for a small-town, grassroots venture. But […]

Rodney Warner

Cancer Death Rates are Falling and the Healthcare System Doesn’t Deserve All the Credit

Posted July 18th, 2016

The death rates of some of the world’s deadliest disease killers are declining and doctors and researchers are at a loss to fully explain it. As much as we want to pat our doctors and medical researchers on their collective backs for their work it doesn’t completely explain what’s going on, according to an article […]

christina bach

Take Me Out To The…Cancer Game

Posted July 14th, 2016

Last night, like many others, I settled in to watch the mid-summer classic, the MLB All Star game. It’s not so much a game, as it is a spectacle. Last night, it also became a cancer spectacle—of standing up and never giving up the fight. This morning, as I thought about it more, I got […]

Bob Riter

We Have Cranky Days

Posted July 8th, 2016

A woman going through cancer treatment was having a bad day. She was miserable and her friends were offering words of encouragement along the lines of, “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” She told me that the encouragement didn’t help. She said that it was like wearing cold, wet clothes. Hearing that she’ll soon have warm, dry […]

Bob Riter

Energetic Woman Did Not Let Cancer Define Her

Posted June 24th, 2016

Carol died last week. She had cancer, but she never let cancer define her. She was always participating in triathlons, climbing mountains or moving boulders in someone’s garden. I marveled at her energy and her ability to get so much life out of each day. Her level of activity was beyond what’s typical for most […]

The Essentials For A Cancer Vacation

Posted June 21st, 2016

My first thought—as we were hugging good-bye and someone said, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”—was that it took something like cancer to motivate us to plan this sibs-and-mom-in-law vacation. And then the next thought was, with everyone’s crazy busy schedules these days, how does anyone have time to plan memory-making experiences with larger, extended groups of the people […]