She read it to me over the telephone.
It felt like I'd heard it ALL before.
Much of it sounded as if I'd written it.
From the article in the Charleston Post & Courier:
At her home in Fishtown, Pa., Andrea Collins Smith, inveterate hipster, South Street fixture and "Punk Rock Mommy" of the blogosphere, is speaking quickly, racing ahead like the fast-spreading cancer that will take her life.
Smith, 37, the raison d'etre for a New Year's Eve day benefit concert organized by Philadelphia's Paul Green School of Rock to raise money for her care and her family's support, has a rare and virulent form of the disease.
In May, two days after graduating with a psychology degree from Temple University and two days before Mother's Day, the mother of six, whose tattoos and piercings are too numerous to count, learned she has inflammatory breast cancer.
Stage 4. Incurable, her doctors said.
Two weeks later, she started chemotherapy: Six rounds of caustic chemicals pumped into her body, three weeks apart.
Oct. 20: Radical surgery to remove both breasts and underarm lymph nodes.
Nov. 20: The start of radiation treatments.
This month, more trouble: A CT scan revealed cancer in two vertebrae.
It wasn't there in September's tests.
"That's how fast my cancer spreads," Smith said. "That's how aggressive this cancer is."
The last line of the article struck home (as if the rest had not):
Because there is no history of cancer in Smith's family, and her strain of the disease usually hits without early warning signs, she titled her blog "Andrea Collins Smith and the Great Cancer Swindle."
Please... I remember how uplifting E & I found all of your comments during our darkest, and not quite so dark, days. Perhaps, you can stop by and say hi to Andrea. She, like another I once knew, is a woman of indominitable spirit and charm.
Click here to zip on over.
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