Eight months after I finished chemotherapy and was home with our girls, a friend approached me. She wanted to use my story to inspire others through her boudoir photography business. How was I going to say no? I had spent over a year, at this point, being told how brave and courageous I was, how I had inspired so many others through some of the hardest moments of their lives. This felt like the next best step.
It wasn’t until I was looking at the photos that I realized how lost I was in my own body. I didn’t recognize who I was anymore. I didn’t recognize my body, not after it had been rocked by a cancer diagnosis that nearly killed me several times. I had new scars, new stretch marks, and a whole new outlook on life, but I didn’t know the woman staring back at me in the mirror that day. The photos captured that exact moment for me.
To understand how I got there, I have to go back to the beginning.
We didn’t have an easy start to our marriage. My husband and I struggled to get pregnant with our first daughter. Doctor after doctor told me I was young and it would come with time. That not having a period for nearly a year and a half was “normal” for a 23 year old. That I needed to lose 50 pounds before my male OBGYN would help me, and I wasn’t even very overweight at that point in my life.
We spent a year working with a reproductive endocrinologist in another city for “unexplained infertility.” We were at the point of being ready to give up, after three years of trying, when we got a positive pregnancy test. This pregnancy started out rough, with a scare at about 8 weeks that sent me to the hospital, preparing myself to lose this baby we had fought so hard for. Everything was okay, and the rest of my pregnancy went well. We welcomed a beautiful baby girl. When she was about 7 months old, I found out I was pregnant with our second. Such exciting times for us, and she was due around my birthday.
Within weeks of our second daughter being born, at 35 weeks 4 days, we found out I was in for the fight of my life. I had gone to my doctor for a regular 3 week postpartum checkup, and for some results from other testing I’d had for a few really strange symptoms I was experiencing. At that appointment, I fell unconscious. I regained consciousness as I was being carted out by EMS into the back of an ambulance, being given the most awful, pasty glucose to raise my sugars. I remember calling my husband to tell him I was going to the hospital, but I don’t remember anything for nearly 5 days after that.
I was placed in a medically induced coma, administered a battery of tests, and started on the antibiotic regimen for sepsis. When I woke up, I was a totally different person, yet somehow the same. I had lost my ovaries and part of my small intestines, and my husband had to make some of the most difficult decisions we have ever faced, while I lay there with a tube down my throat, fighting for my life. It was then that we found out I had a very rare and aggressive cancer taking over my body, leading me down a dark, dimly lit tunnel. Part of my identity changed without my ovaries, along with severe internal bleeding that required more surgeries, and 5 long months of chemotherapy, daily needles and injections, and frequent spinal taps with spinal chemo.
It wasn’t long after I had finally started to feel like myself again, despite the PTSD-induced insomnia from my battle with Burkitt’s Lymphoma, that the pandemic hit. I had two little girls who relied on me. I was broken, lost, and exhausted, unsure how I was getting up and doing the day-to-day life required of me. Looking back, I’m not sure how I got through it all without a mental breakdown. The isolation alone was horrible on my mental health. On top of the PTSD, I was also immunocompromised and got sick incredibly easily, so I had to keep that in mind whenever it came to socializing, even before the pandemic.
I began healing and coming back to myself when I stepped outside of the motherhood label and started focusing on who I was. I started a small product-based bath and body business. I began working out every day, and pouring my heart and soul into the health of our family. We changed how we were eating, started growing more of our own food, canning more, and moving more as a family. We swapped all of our personal hygiene products, our cleaning products, and everything in between for something cleaner.
I started journaling. I took classes to help regain my short-term memory, which had become a real challenge after chemotherapy and the coma. We had been warned I would struggle with it, we just didn’t know for how long.
Slowly but surely, I started to recognize the woman in the mirror again. She started to become me. I found a good therapist who supported me through CBT, journaling, and navigating the non-death grief, trauma, insomnia, depression, severe anxiety, and PTSD I was living with. But it wasn’t until we lost my dad, five years ago, that I truly began to heal, understanding that there was more to me than I had ever imagined. That was when the visions and the voices started coming, as my psychic gift began to open. Then my healing gift followed.
And now I’m living this life that’s full of harmony, alignment, gratitude, love, and light. We are homeschooling our children and homesteading on the 17 acres that belonged to my dad. There’s something sacred about raising our girls on his land, growing our food in his soil, and building a rooted, intentional life in the very place he loved. His passing cracked me open, and somehow, it also brought me home, to myself, and to this piece of earth we now call ours.
If you’re reading this and you don’t recognize the woman staring back at you in the mirror, I want you to know something: she’s still in there. I know, because I lost myself completely, and I found my way home again. It didn’t happen all at once, and it didn’t happen perfectly. It happened slowly, one small act of coming back to myself at a time. And if you’re in that dark, dimly lit tunnel right now, please hear me. You don’t have to find your way through it alone. 🤍
With love, Lindsay
Our home. Our story. Our life. Our love. 