You need a coach who has walked this path.
My cancer story
CERTIFIED CANCER JOURNEY COACH & CAREGIVER
Amanda Burgess
I was called to coaching following a five-year run of playing caregiver and advocate to family members grappling with cancer. I coach from the heart, using a lifetime of storytelling skills to hold space for you to speak your truth, process your emotions, and design your dream life — while living with cancer, and on the other side of it.
Everyone has a pivotal moment in their cancer journey. Mine came on December 25, 2017, in a darkened movie theatre in Paris. My husband and I were in France seeking a definitive diagnosis on the tumour in his pancreas…which we’d received the previous day on Christmas Eve. As I sat in that theatre, I found myself waging an all-out internal war with a whopper of a panic attack.
My heart raced in pace with my mind, which already had Gabe dead and buried, and me the grieving widow. I wanted to tear myself out of my own skin. I wanted to run from that theatre and the truth I carried under a heart that was already breaking.
But all I could do was sit there as the tsunami raged inside me, willing my face to remain blank and neutral. Gabe had become hyper-aware of my every expression, and anything lower than neutral spiked his fear and anxiety. Those two hours I spent silently hyperventilating in a French movie theatre led to the single most defining moment of my life.
When the lights came up, bringing me out of the darkness, I knew I had a choice. That I needed to decide then and there who I wanted to show up as in this journey. Someone who lives in the future — a nightmare of their own worst imaginings — and is defeated before the first step. Or someone who pulls themselves back to the now, digs deep for inner strength, and helps their husband live the shit out of every single day he has left, no matter how few or many there may be.
That moment — that decision — put me squarely on the road to becoming the person I am today. Three years later, I am deeply grateful to the fear-struck woman who saw past it to the one thing within her control: How she chose to experience a journey that no one should ever have to.