From Jim—
We’re celebrating a #cancerversary in our house. As you know, three years ago, Nikoo was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, twenty years after her original bout with cancer.
Everyone deals with cancer in their own way, and no one should ever feel that their response is ever wrong or lacking. I can only speak to the way Nikoo has responded, and what she’s done since her metastatic diagnosis demonstrates exactly who she is. What I have seen is that this woman—who I’ve been blessed to love for 45 years—chose not to hide herself away or give up on life.
What Nikoo has done is to dedicate herself to helping other women who often need support and information and love as they travel the frightening and isolating journey of the cancer patient.
I can’t tell you how many hours every day she spends educating herself and building community and connecting. She participates in webinars, reads medical articles, and deepens her understanding of cancer, genetics, nutrition, and choices. But most important of all, she emails texts and calls her ‘sisters’. Constantly.
She does this with the conscious goal of helping women learn about their specific disease and possible treatment, and to bolster the courage to advocate for themselves. And when she loses a friend who ‘crosses over’, she weeps for them and for (and often with) the families and loved ones they leave behind.
Nikoo is truly an angel and a gift to me and to her family and to all her #mbc and her lobular breast cancer sisters.
I’m hopeful for many, many more cancerversaries, and I thank God for every blessed day I get to spend with her.