Certified resilience and leadership coach Melanie Childers was diagnosed at 34 with Stage II, hormone-positive breast cancer.  Today, Melanie reads her piece “No” from Wildfire Magazine’s 2018 “(In)fertility” issue. A decade ago, cancer made Melanie’s fertility choices final. A cancer diagnosis that affects reproductive organs that comes well after menopause is not going to land the same way the same diagnosis will decades prior.  It is heartbreaking, maddening, painful in a way that is hard to articulate.  Melanie wrote her piece 4 years ago, and today has the retrospect of 10 years to share her reflections.  April and Melanie will talk about what processing and grief looks like now and how cancer clarifies life’s path.  They’ll also discuss how writing is a powerful way to process wounds, and allows for a way to revisit previous versions of ourselves when we read our written words later in time.  Melanie’s piece is included in Wildfire’s upcoming book “Igniting the Fire Within: Stories of Healing, Hope & Humor.”  This episode contains explicit language.

More about Melanie and The Bad Bitch Entrepreneur podcast: https://www.melaniechilders.com

https://www.instagram.com/the_underbelly/

More about this episode’s sponsor, “Life Reconstructed” author Kim Harms: https://kimharms.net

Ida Sukrungruang’s essay: https://brevitymag.com/issues/issue-49-may-2015-gender/after-the-hysterectomy/

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