What would you do?

Slow day at work today.

They seem to have become progressively slower for the past few weeks.

Today is especially, quiet, so I am reading. It’s not something I find myself doing often, but the other day I stumbled upon a series of journal entries written by a young woman from San Francisco. Ever since reading the first entry, I’ve been hooked.

Her name is Alicia Parlette, and I immediately felt a strong connections to her writings because when she started them, she was a young, aspiring journalist, pondering her future and working as a copy editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.

One deadline day, she gets a call from her physician. A lump she had removed from her right breast was cancerous.

More tests follow. She has soft tissue sarcoma, a very rare form of cancer that doesn’t have a high survival rate.

Everything in her life changes in an instant.

She decides to write about it for The Chronicle. Her writer’s voice is very moving and she writes very honestly about her deepest fears.

Her series began five years ago. 

Today, she lies in a palliative care bed, surrounded by loved ones, awaiting the end. She recently decided to forego further treatment and accept to inevitable – that the cancer will end her life. It was upon reading this that I decided to start at the beginning to get caught up on her journey.

Her story is incredibly hard to take in, but very touching and surprisingly uplifting as through her journey she rediscovers what’s really important in her life.

It is disheartening to know that there won’t be a happy ending, but as a therapist tells Alicia – you have to focus on the journey; and reading about her journey is an inspiring thing.