Athena Scalise Waitt
Athena Scalise Waitt believes that thriving with cancer is a choice.
Athena Scalise Waitt, born in the mid-60s, diagnosed in 2007, and still thriving in the mid-2020s! Only daughter to a smart, successful Greek mother and a deceased, warm-hearted, and funny USCG veteran Italian-American father; sibling to bestie older sister, and tough and tender older brother. Wife to an imported Scotsman, via romance in the Eternal City of Rome. Mama to two now-grown daughters who mean the world to me, one studious and witty, and the other creative and bright.
Despite being on a wellness journey most of my life, thanks to my mother’s nutrition revolution away from processed foods and back to her Mediterranean roots when I was 12, I have always struggled with my health – allergies, repeated illnesses, dietary challenges, etc. Shockingly, at the age of 39, I suffered a mild stroke related to a yet-to-be-discovered congenital heart defect. Interestingly, the defect’s risks were most likely exacerbated by a potentially higher level of clotting factor in my blood due to cancer growing unbeknownst to me until 2 years later, when I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer at the age of 41.
Devastated is the word that comes to mind. Heartbroken for my girls and my husband, for the future we might not have together. However, I’m not one to wring my hands and do nothing in the face of a crisis or a setback, a lesson I learned after facing other health and life challenges. I sought to learn everything I could about breast cancer and my possible options. I would have preferred to follow a natural protocol. Still, back then, studies were vague and expensive. There were too many to understand which ones would be the most likely to work, so I opted not to go bankrupt or displace my family without any guarantee of success. Instead, I followed the standards of care covered by insurance and recommended by multiple doctors: lumpectomy, 16 weeks of dose-dense chemo, and 33 radiation treatments over 9 months. As I write this, it’s hard to believe that all this really happened so long ago, at a time when I wasn’t sure I’d live past the 2-year survivor re-occurrence mark for TNBC patients. I won’t bore you with all the treatment ups and downs, as each of us has our unique experiences of all the glorious and gory forms of torture we endure in the name of saving our lives.
My desire is to share with you something much more important – HOPE. I realized during my “studies” at the time that more and more patients were LIVING with cancer, THRIVING with cancer, and not just surviving cancer. Thanks to refinements in diagnoses and treatments, cancer, for many, has become more of a managed chronic illness, not a death sentence. Those tragic outcomes still exist, but thankfully, not as many as before. I don’t know why I was spared; maybe God’s not done with me yet, as I am far from perfect. I know I have so much that I desire to pay forward through my story and my professional mission to “unleash your (mind & body) potential holistically.”
So, what is life like THRIVING through cancer? Whatever YOU make of it. For me, it was embracing a new normal and, over time, for better or worse, resuming some of the old normal. Some people experience an epiphany; others carry their journey on their sleeve, and still, others get on with their lives as if almost nothing happened. There is no right or wrong way; there is only YOUR way to push forward toward the goal of THRIVING. For me, surviving sounds so basic, whereas thriving sounds so bountiful.
Survive Definition: continue to live or exist, especially in spite of danger or hardship.
Thrive Definition: to flourish or grow vigorously, and it can be applied to something like a business or something or someone’s actual health. It’s a choice, no matter how many days are ahead; let’s make them abundant, flourishing, vigorous, and filled with HOPE.
–Athena Scalise Waitt, Greater Washington D.C.