Play & Book Excerpts
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All of Us Warriors
(She Writes Press)
© 2020 Rebecca Whitehead Munn
Rebecca comments on the layout of her book:
The design of All Of Us Warriors includes tips, experiences and advice that helped to sustain hope and focus during each person's journey. I wanted the stories to chronicle a cancer patient's journey to make them relatable to the reader; and because of my previous experiences with my mom, I knew that the tips and advice would be helpful to others.
I have received a lot of positive feedback, including appreciation for these end-of-chapter sections. And while writing the book, I found similarities in some of the tips and advice. Some of the most common threads: love through the fear; engage, versus withdraw; cancer is only a season of life, it doesn't define the person.
The design of All Of Us Warriors includes tips, experiences and advice that helped to sustain hope and focus during each person's journey. I wanted the stories to chronicle a cancer patient's journey to make them relatable to the reader; and because of my previous experiences with my mom, I knew that the tips and advice would be helpful to others.
I have received a lot of positive feedback, including appreciation for these end-of-chapter sections. And while writing the book, I found similarities in some of the tips and advice. Some of the most common threads: love through the fear; engage, versus withdraw; cancer is only a season of life, it doesn't define the person.
From Rebecca’s introduction…
One of my favorite things to do as a little girl was to pick a stem of goatsbeard wildflowers with the seed head still intact. I would hold a bloom in my hand, close my eyes, and make a wish, and then open my eyes and blow the white seeds away. Each stem would disappear one at a time, carried off by the wind. As I thought of this experience, I decided that would be another way for me to visualize Mom’s body healing. I sat there in silence with my eyes closed, holding her hand, and visualizing the cancer cells being those seed stems. I made a wish for healing and then blew the seeds away, imagining the wind taking them to a faraway place outside Mom’s body. It calmed my heart to be doing my part in assisting Mom’s healing, and she was calmed by my willingness to participate, learn, and help her survive. Day after day, even after she was released from the hospital, Mom sustained her focus on healing her body on her own and with my help.
After I went back to Austin to resume my college classes, I thought of her each night before I went to bed, and I continued to practice these visualizations. As Mom endured chemotherapy and radiation weekly for the next six months, she suffered many of the humiliating and uncomfortable side effects, including hair loss, swollen ankles, and an upset stomach. While wigs are very common today, and organizations like Locks of Love enable healthy people to donate hair for wigs, they were very hard to find in 1984. We were fortunate to live in Houston, where Mom had access to wigs through MD Anderson Cancer Center. She also reached out to her friends to support her and help her process the physical and emotional impacts of the cancer. She started taking daily walks with these friends around her neighborhood and around Rice University’s campus, near our childhood home. Her friends provided a safe place and supportive ear for Mom to release her anger and sadness about the cancer and the changes she was experiencing in her body.
Her face always lit up when she talked about those walks and how much her friends buoyed her. In doing so, Mom modeled for me how valuable ongoing encouragement and love from close friends is to lifelong health. Around the time I graduated from college, Mom successfully completed her chemotherapy and radiation treatments and moved into remission with grace and reverence. Her hair grew back gray and wavy—a big change from the coal-black, straight hair we had known growing up. Since the cancer was late stage and had spread to so many of her lymph nodes, the medical protocol was to check her body regularly to make sure the cancer did not show up again. So, for fifteen years following the official start of her remission, Mom endured painful bone marrow and liver tests every six months. She would go off quietly to those appointments, without ever drawing attention to the experience, the pain she endured, or the process. She was so very strong and determined to live a long life and share it with the people she loved, minimizing any discomfort or pain she may have been feeling.
At the time of her surgery, Mom’s doctor had shared with her the appropriate amount of information about her tumor: where it was and what kind of operation he would perform, including removing many of the lymph nodes under her right arm. However, he had stopped short of telling her the odds of her surviving. At the time, I had been so overwhelmed with the shock of what was happening that I had not thought to ask. When I reflected on it later, my interpretation was that he must have believed her situation was tenuous enough, amid all the surgery and treatments, that giving her odds of surviving would not have added anything positive to her outlook or her healing process. At the time, we all fully trusted this physician and his choices and believed he knew best about what he did and didn’t share. What he did explain to each of us was how advanced a level her cancer had reached, and that it had a 98 percent chance of recurrence. He also mentioned that because Mom’s own mother had died of breast cancer, each of us, her five daughters, had a 75 percent chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer ourselves.
Mom lived a cancer-free full live for seventeen years until she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2003. Following her diagnosis, she started treatment with traditional Western methods—radiation and chemotherapy, followed by surgery—but she quickly felt in her body that while that regimen was killing the cancer cells, the drugs were also killing her healthy cells. She suffered many of the debilitating side effects of this chemotherapy drug, including mouth sores, diarrhea, and dry eyes. After her surgery, she was only able to withstand a portion of her post-surgery chemotherapy treatments.
A year and a half later, when she discovered the cancer had metastasized into her lungs, she was determined to have a good quality of life for whatever time she had left. She tried a chemotherapy regimen, although it made her deeply ill again, and she almost died from low potassium. Mom stopped her chemotherapy infusions and switched to taking Chinese herbs daily and having weekly acupuncture treatments. She lived fairly comfortably for another year and a half using these Eastern medicine techniques, in addition to taking daily walks around her neighborhood on Lake Austin.
Mom taught me so very much, both in her fruitful living years and in her last year on Earth. She was a voracious reader, always questioning the status quo and expanding her traditional faith to incorporate more metaphysical beliefs. My parents enjoyed a loving marriage for fifty-five years. Their marriage ended when my mother passed away in 2006 at age seventy-seven, when I was forty-three. Even in dying, she gave me an eye-opening and heartfelt opportunity to learn from her views. One important lesson she taught me through the process was that we don’t really have to say good-bye to our loved ones as they pass from physical life. Rather, as they transition and take on the form of angels, they remain engaged in our lives by watching over us, cheering us on through our many joys, and supporting us through our tribulations. And sometimes, if we are open to believing it is possible, our loved ones boldly make themselves known and forever change our physical lives for the better.
One of my favorite things to do as a little girl was to pick a stem of goatsbeard wildflowers with the seed head still intact. I would hold a bloom in my hand, close my eyes, and make a wish, and then open my eyes and blow the white seeds away. Each stem would disappear one at a time, carried off by the wind. As I thought of this experience, I decided that would be another way for me to visualize Mom’s body healing. I sat there in silence with my eyes closed, holding her hand, and visualizing the cancer cells being those seed stems. I made a wish for healing and then blew the seeds away, imagining the wind taking them to a faraway place outside Mom’s body. It calmed my heart to be doing my part in assisting Mom’s healing, and she was calmed by my willingness to participate, learn, and help her survive. Day after day, even after she was released from the hospital, Mom sustained her focus on healing her body on her own and with my help.
After I went back to Austin to resume my college classes, I thought of her each night before I went to bed, and I continued to practice these visualizations. As Mom endured chemotherapy and radiation weekly for the next six months, she suffered many of the humiliating and uncomfortable side effects, including hair loss, swollen ankles, and an upset stomach. While wigs are very common today, and organizations like Locks of Love enable healthy people to donate hair for wigs, they were very hard to find in 1984. We were fortunate to live in Houston, where Mom had access to wigs through MD Anderson Cancer Center. She also reached out to her friends to support her and help her process the physical and emotional impacts of the cancer. She started taking daily walks with these friends around her neighborhood and around Rice University’s campus, near our childhood home. Her friends provided a safe place and supportive ear for Mom to release her anger and sadness about the cancer and the changes she was experiencing in her body.
Her face always lit up when she talked about those walks and how much her friends buoyed her. In doing so, Mom modeled for me how valuable ongoing encouragement and love from close friends is to lifelong health. Around the time I graduated from college, Mom successfully completed her chemotherapy and radiation treatments and moved into remission with grace and reverence. Her hair grew back gray and wavy—a big change from the coal-black, straight hair we had known growing up. Since the cancer was late stage and had spread to so many of her lymph nodes, the medical protocol was to check her body regularly to make sure the cancer did not show up again. So, for fifteen years following the official start of her remission, Mom endured painful bone marrow and liver tests every six months. She would go off quietly to those appointments, without ever drawing attention to the experience, the pain she endured, or the process. She was so very strong and determined to live a long life and share it with the people she loved, minimizing any discomfort or pain she may have been feeling.
At the time of her surgery, Mom’s doctor had shared with her the appropriate amount of information about her tumor: where it was and what kind of operation he would perform, including removing many of the lymph nodes under her right arm. However, he had stopped short of telling her the odds of her surviving. At the time, I had been so overwhelmed with the shock of what was happening that I had not thought to ask. When I reflected on it later, my interpretation was that he must have believed her situation was tenuous enough, amid all the surgery and treatments, that giving her odds of surviving would not have added anything positive to her outlook or her healing process. At the time, we all fully trusted this physician and his choices and believed he knew best about what he did and didn’t share. What he did explain to each of us was how advanced a level her cancer had reached, and that it had a 98 percent chance of recurrence. He also mentioned that because Mom’s own mother had died of breast cancer, each of us, her five daughters, had a 75 percent chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer ourselves.
Mom lived a cancer-free full live for seventeen years until she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2003. Following her diagnosis, she started treatment with traditional Western methods—radiation and chemotherapy, followed by surgery—but she quickly felt in her body that while that regimen was killing the cancer cells, the drugs were also killing her healthy cells. She suffered many of the debilitating side effects of this chemotherapy drug, including mouth sores, diarrhea, and dry eyes. After her surgery, she was only able to withstand a portion of her post-surgery chemotherapy treatments.
A year and a half later, when she discovered the cancer had metastasized into her lungs, she was determined to have a good quality of life for whatever time she had left. She tried a chemotherapy regimen, although it made her deeply ill again, and she almost died from low potassium. Mom stopped her chemotherapy infusions and switched to taking Chinese herbs daily and having weekly acupuncture treatments. She lived fairly comfortably for another year and a half using these Eastern medicine techniques, in addition to taking daily walks around her neighborhood on Lake Austin.
Mom taught me so very much, both in her fruitful living years and in her last year on Earth. She was a voracious reader, always questioning the status quo and expanding her traditional faith to incorporate more metaphysical beliefs. My parents enjoyed a loving marriage for fifty-five years. Their marriage ended when my mother passed away in 2006 at age seventy-seven, when I was forty-three. Even in dying, she gave me an eye-opening and heartfelt opportunity to learn from her views. One important lesson she taught me through the process was that we don’t really have to say good-bye to our loved ones as they pass from physical life. Rather, as they transition and take on the form of angels, they remain engaged in our lives by watching over us, cheering us on through our many joys, and supporting us through our tribulations. And sometimes, if we are open to believing it is possible, our loved ones boldly make themselves known and forever change our physical lives for the better.
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Rebecca Whitehead Munn is an award-winning author and speaker, healthcare change catalyst, and value creator. All of Us Warriors is her second title, following her award-winning, debut memoir, The Gift of Goodbye: A Story of Agape Love released in 2017.
She has been a featured Maria Shriver Architect of Change on surviving grief and shared her healing through yoga story at mindbodygreen.com. Rebecca is a certified End of Life Doula, certified in Positive Psychology, and a Nashville Healthcare Council Fellow. Rebecca is happiest spending time outdoors or with her two children, eating Mexican food, practicing yoga, listening to live music, and using her chaotic Aries energy for good. She was born in Bloomington, IN, grew up in Houston, TX, and has lived in Nashville, TN, since 2005. |
