Lung Cancer Advocate Shares Importance of Staying Hopeful During Pandemic

These are really hard times, and we need to recognize that we’re not alone, that we’re not the only ones, we’re not the only one going through the hard time, and it’s so important to reach out to others, to reach out to someone, to ask for help, and we hear some really, really sad stories of things like people being turned away from the ER or we can have a lot of fear about what might happen. And I think it’s really important to not let those fears rule our lives, that can be really challenging to do, it’s very easy to say, but it takes a lot of skills to live without letting fear take hold at times. So, reach out for help. Talk to people, ask them, how do they cope? What do they do? For me, I talked to friends and my friends help remind me of what’s real and what’s true, my friends helped me hold on to hope. I’m a person of faith, so I believe in Jesus, and I read the Bible and I pray, and that really helps me too.

But each person finds their own ways to hold on to hope and let go of fear, and fear is, fear is not our friend. Good things don’t come from fear. So the other thing is we need to be advocates for ourselves, sometimes we need to ask for what we want, and if we believe in something, we need to fight for it, we can’t just sit back and expect things to be dropped in our lap, so they’re gonna be tons, when we’re going to have to really, really work hard, and that could hurt and in my life is an advocate, I find there’s a lot of pain and a lot of hard work, but there’s also a lot of real joy, and I get to meet some of the most amazing new people, and those are people who helped me have hope, so grab a hold of the people who help you have hope and don’t let go, call them up and reach out to them, lean on them.