SPOKANE, Wash – Livestrong at Spokane’s YMCA is transforming cancer survivors’ lives.
The program helps people who have defeated cancer adapt to normality after going through physically and mentally draining treatments.
Macie Chambers, Debi Moon and Mary Jo Kester were once all strangers. But Tuesday morning, as they sat inside Spokane’s YMCA, they recalled something they all have in common.
“You feel defeated, you just feel defeated, and you don’t have the strength to get back up like you used to,” Debi Moon, manager at Clinkerdagger and a cancer survivor, said.
Moon was diagnosed with stage three, aggressive lung cancer last April. She went through chemo and radiation for four months.
“I had tons of support, but sympathetic, but not empathetic. They could not understand what you went through,” Moon said.
Macie Chambers was diagnosed the year before Moon. She was in her first trimester of pregnancy.
“I didn’t know exactly what that meant for my pregnancy or for me,” Chambers recalled because her doctors didn’t know what kind of cancer she had at the time.
They would later find out that she had a rare germ cell cancer and performed a life-saving surgery. The baby boy did just fine and is healthy.
It was along Chambers’ treatment route that she met Moon. The two sat side-by-side, receiving chemo and radiation.
“Once I finished all of my treatment, that’s kind of when everything got a bit harder,” Chambers said.
So she turned to Moon. And Moon had already turned to Livestrong.
“One, you have the support from people that understand, and two it made me want to commit to help others,” Moon said.
Just as Mary Jo Kester has been doing with Livestrong for 12 years.
“We just help people discover what they already have – those inner strengths that they already have. Those dreams that they already have, that may have gotten set way on the back burner,” Kester said.
Kester, herself, defeated breast cancer several years ago. Ever since then, she’s been working for Livestrong.
“Put cancer in the rear-view mirror. We tend to not want cancer to define who we are,” Kester said.
Because these three, beautiful women are so much more. They’re moms, wives, daughters, granddaughters, and now, all three are friends and will always be there for one another.
Through the month of August, Moon is donating $1 per each Crème Brûlée sold at Clinkerdagger to Spokane’s Livestrong. If you would like to donate or learn more about the program, click this link.
