MAMM After the initial shock subsided, what were your thoughts about what this diagnosis was going to do to your life and what you were going to do about it?

M.E. I could clearly see the choices I had in how to walk through this. And I decided that I was going to get something out of it, that it was going to make me a better person. That there was a gift in this, that I would find something in it. And so far, I have, and it has been. My life is clearer, cleaner, stronger. I don't waver much anymore and go, Ohhhhh… I don't know… I say to myself, What's the best thing for me, for my life? And I do it. Period. Done. It is so much easier for me to be decisive. It's almost like I've been given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card—you know, from a Monopoly game? And I can walk right on through things that used to confuse or stop me.

MAMM Did the possibility of death ever seem very real to you, or were you confident that you would not die?

M.E. No, I felt very confident that I wouldn't die. The first day I received my diagnosis, almost immediately I checked in with myself and felt, no, death is not a part of this.

But this is certainly the hardest thing I ever have gone through, and chemotherapy was absolutely the toughest thing of all. Oh, they gotta change that. It's barbaric. Let's kill every living cell in the body, and we'll cross our fingers that it gets the cancer. What? Come on. And the same chemo for my cancer as for prostate cancer? I don't think so.