"How Cancer Helped Me Become a Successful Online Businesswoman"

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit me at Tashy's Place -- my online "home from home".

My name is Natasha, although all my friends call me Tashy. If this is your first visit to Tashy's Place, I suppose I should tell you a little about myself -- and how being diagnosed with a form of cancer helped me start my own successful online business.

After I completed university (majored in Communications and Anthropology) I joined a large supermarket chain in their marketing  and PR department. Things were going well when, after I'd been there just under a year, I discovered I have something called Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. This is a type of cancer of the lymphatic system -- the body's blood-filtering tissues that help fight infection and disease.

Like all other cancers, Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (NHL) started to happen when my cells began dividing too much and too fast in an uncontrolled way. The lymphatic cells  started to overcrowd, invade, and destroy my healthy lymph tissue and I was told they can spread to other organs as well.

Great!
Anyhoo . . . suddenly, from always being in totally good health, I was now told I have to undergo intensive chemotherapy, as the particular form of NHL I have is quite aggressive. I was also told by my oncologist (oh he was a real ray of sunshine . . .) that this would involve between 6 and 8 monthly courses of chemo, with each course lasting 3 or 4 days in a row. In other words, I could be out of action for anything up to a week each month for 8 months.
And I had to start immediately.

Shoot! REAL bummer!

I couldn't ethically expect my employers to keep me on under these circumstances, so I resigned from my job. (LOL. When I told them why, they did say we could try to "work something out" . . . but they didn't protest TOO hard about me resigning!)

But here's the thing -- although I felt all ethical and honourable about "doing the right thing" and resigning from my job, I now had no income to pay my rent and for other little luxuries      . . . like food. I also learned very soon that although I had some medical insurance, it wasn't going to be nearly enough to cover all the chemo and hospital expenses that were about to invade my life. I'd have to somehow find a way to pay the balance on my own.

Okay, NOW I was SERIOUSLY bummed out!

So I did what any logical, rational, sensible female would do. I spent the next few days crying, wailing, eating chocolate and ice-cream and bemoaning my fate, saying things like "why me?" and generally feeling very sorry for myself! When I was done with that, (meaning, when even my best friends couldn't bear to listen to it any more) I did the next thing any logical female woud do -- I started to seriously panic about how I was going to manage.

It so happens, one of my (aforementioned) best friends has been keeping herself living very comfortably through Internet Marketing, by running her own online business. The rest of us were never really sure what she was doing or how she was doing it, but we all knew she was living very well. She arrived at my apartment on the Sunday morning after my week of misery, with take-out for both of us and some firm advice. "Tashy, you can carry on crying and panicking and feeling sorry for yourself, or you can now get up off your butt and start taking some positive action to sort yourself out financially, so you can get all the treatment you need to take care of yourself." She then spent the rest of that Sunday showing me what she was doing online and how I can do it as well, working from home.

She was a Godsend! A real guardian angel.

With her help, I was soon starting to earn a regular online income -- enough to pay my rent and cover all my monthly expenses, plus some extra luxuries, as well as pay the horrendous hospital bills.
 

Real "Retail Therapy"

A few of my friends (one of whom is a qualified doctor) decided I need some cheering up before my next course of chemotherapy. So they "prescribed" a course of Retail Therapy :) They came to fetch me and we went to the Mall where we spent most of Saturday shopping, laughing, eating, laughing, drinking (only coffee and juice for me . . . sigh . . .), laughing, going to see a movie (Avatar), laughing, and generally having an incredibly wacky, enjoyable, laughter-filled time. And you know what? It really WAS just what the doctor (did I mention my one friend actually IS a doctor) ordered.  When I started my chemo session on the following Monday, instead of just being down and depressed and like "woe is me", I was still giggling over a whole bunch of things we'd all got up to the previous Saturday. In fact I was in such a good mood, some of the other people in the ward (also having chemo) wanted to know why I was so chirpy.

So I started telling them  and soon the whole ward was laughing and chattering away, with other people contributing their own funny anecdotes and jokes. Then some of the nursing sisters in charge of that ward joined in -- and one of them told me afterwards it was one of the most fun days they'd ever experienced in a ward full of sick people having chemotherapy. So that old clichè about laughter being the best medicine is absolutely true. If it can make a whole bunch of people with all different types of NHL and leukemia have fun and feel good while they're busy having chemo, (which really isn't that much fun, trust me), then how much more good can it do for someone (you maybe) who is not suffering from a life-threatening disease. So -- next time you decide to do the "woe is me" thing and feel sorry for yourself, firstly give a sincere prayer of thanks that you have your health and then get together with some good friends (it helps if they're as wacky as mine ;)), and go out and have some fun. MUCH better than sitting at home moping around and feeling sorry for yourself.