There is a before and an after in my life. Before, there was the gentle ache in my thigh I mistook for a pregnancy pain. After, there was the stark, sterile language of a diagnosis: a rare sarcoma. In the space between, my daughter Liora was born, her tiny hands a promise of a future I was suddenly terrified I would not see.
The chemotherapy was a fire that burned away the easy comforts of new motherhood. My milk dried up; my strength vanished. Then came the amputation, a brutal transaction where I traded a limb for a chance at more time. Waking to the new topography of my body, I was adrift in a sea of guilt. How could I chase a crawling child? How could I stand strong for her when I could not stand at all?
Just as I was learning the new grammar of my body—the language of crutches and phantom pain—a new shadow fell. A note, casually spotted in my file, spoke of a lesion on my lung. The wait for answers was its own special torment, a week stretched thin with fear. But the news was a reprieve: it was benign. The storm had not broken anew.
In the quiet, determined work of physical therapy, I found a guide. Another woman, Saoirse, who understood the landscape of loss. She did not offer pity, but practical wisdom and the quiet assurance that life, in all its richness, continues. With her encouragement, I learned to walk again, not as I once had, but with a new and deliberate strength. The first time I stood on my prosthetic and held my daughter, truly held her without collapsing into a chair, I felt a wholeness that had nothing to do with the body I was born with. My story is not one of a battle against cancer, but a testament to the love that gives you a reason to fight, and the resilience that waits to be discovered within us when we have no other choice.
