About this episode
I was eight years old when I was diagnosed with cancer. I lost my leg. I spent 18 months in treatment. My childhood became hospital rooms, chemotherapy, infections, surgeries, and things no eight-year-old should have to understand.
And then I survived.
Eventually, I became an athlete and competed at the highest level of my sport. I built a career. I became very good at doing the very thing I was expected to do: overcoming
There was just one problem.
I didn’t realize how much my identity depended on it.
I thought the story began with the diagnosis. It didn’t.
It started in 1953, to my mother growing up in southern Utah. She was just five years old when the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in Nevada.
The government knew radioactive fallout would reach surrounding communities. They told people there was nothing to worry about.
Then the sheep started dying.
Thousands of them and my mother was one of the children exposed to that fallout.
And because women are born with the eggs they will carry throughout their lives, the cell my body was eventually built from existed inside my mother’s ovary in 1953.
I’d thought cancer was just something that happened but what if the story you believe about yourself isn’t true? Or at least, only half true?