Welcome!
All the time you hear people say “If you would’ve asked me a year ago what I would be doing right now…” and then they tell their story. However, that’s exactly how I feel about my life right now, I could even do the ‘five years ago’ versus the ‘year ago’ story. Before I go into my own little story let’s first give you some information about me.
My name is Amber Rodriguez (aka A-Rod) and I am a 34 year old living in Colorado with my husband Nick. I am originally from Wisconsin and moved out to Colorado in 2007, it’s safe to say I don’t have plans to go back anytime soon. I originally moved out here to move to a bigger city for my degree and plus, the weather and atmosphere here is amazing. Eventually though I finished my masters program and yet, like most people, never went down the career path I had originally planned. Fortunately, my degree is in psychology which does come in handy on a daily basis, for a variety of reasons. I currently work in a laboratory in an administrative role that handles external business where we act as a reference lab for other facilities.
My husband and I met in May of 2014 through a mutual friend, her brother played baseball with him and she used to hang out with them and go to the games. As you can now assume, my husband plays amateur baseball as a left handed pitcher, outfielder and sometimes a 1st baseman. When we first met I hated baseball, but I did start going to his games to show support and now I love it. Seriously. I have even found myself watching baseball when he isn’t home or checking in on the score of the Rockies game. Last year I had the privilege of learning how to keep the book for the games and I think that’s really when I started to love baseball more; it helped me understand the skill it takes to play and helped me follow the game.
Now I suppose we could do a quick version of my ‘year ago’ story, because the long story is built into a lot of my journal/blog posts. If someone had asked me a year ago, where I thought I would be, the last thing I would’ve said was fighting cancer. Yup, within the first 6 days of the new year I was diagnosed with breast cancer (my official Facebook announcement is below) and it immediately changed the direction of my life, forever. I know a lot of this paragraph sounds cliche but it’s true. The minute you hear the words you have cancer, your entire life changes, forever. Every day I learn something new or realize I have a new perspective because I now think about things differently. Which really brings me to the reason that I decided I wanted to start this website.
This year has been an interesting year, it’s been long and short, difficult and easy and full of new lessons every day. There have been many moments where people tell me how inspirational I am or how they look up to me and it’s a little strange. It’s strange because I am just waking up every morning and trying to do the best that I can, just like everyone else. I do try to have an approach to most things in life with a positive attitude and that’s how I approach cancer too. It’s a horrible thing but I don’t need to have a negative attitude every day about it, I can still find humor and silver linings to make it seem not so bad. I also have people that have wanted to keep up with my journey and I am a big component of sharing our struggles along with our wins and positive moments. Sharing can provide so many different things, it can: bring people closer together, educate, let others know they are not alone, help someone who might be or may eventually go through something similar, give another person the strength to share their own story, etc.
My point here is that I am not forcing anyone to be here, but if you are here I hope that you find something out of one or more of my posts. For this year, a lot of you will learn about what it is like to have breast cancer and what my journey has been like. I have shared a lot on my CaringBridge website and social media, but there is also a lot that I haven’t shared. This website will be providing some of the personal entries of the thoughts and journal entries I had while living my journey from beginning to end. However, sometimes I will also post about other stuff: our travels, relationships, fitness, etc. As I mentioned, my life is very different and has been since January 6th of this year, and I am a little excited to be moving forward and living life differently than I have before. So… I apologize for the long introduction and I hope you enjoy your time here. Just one more quick thing, I am extremely sarcastic and make jokes a lot, but there are also real emotions that can be found here too, along with swear words and conversations about sex and my boobs. You’ve been warned if those aren’t your type of things :).
Have a lovely day and enjoy whatever you may read on here!
Amber
The ‘Official’ Facebook Announcement
The first month of 2017 isn’t exactly what we thought it would be. And since there’s never a good way to say what I am saying, I’ll just say it. On January 6th I was diagnosed with breast cancer and on January 11th we learned it was stage two and what the rest of our year will look like. After meeting with my team of amazing oncologists, we learned that I will be receiving chemotherapy, going through a mastectomy and then also receiving radiation.
Due to my diagnosis and our aggressive approach, Nick and I have also decided to postpone our wedding day and celebration for when my treatment is complete and when we can also celebrate me being cancer free. However, Nick and I did decide to still get married so we could be husband and wife through this journey. On January 19th, we were fortunate enough to have Reegan marry us with Nick and Tad as our witnesses.
As this mug says, I plan on making this cancer my bitch and still have a great 2017 despite the bumpy road we may have in front of us. I have to give a special shout out on this mug as it was created by my favorite Etsy shop owner when I wanted something to show my humor and positive spin on this difficult turn of events. She also helped create the idea of having a motivational quote on the back to keep me fighting every day. Her link is in my comments because she is amazing and I appreciate this mug more than she or anyone else knows.
Over the last few weeks as we have slowly been telling people the news and the outpouring of support has been amazing. We are so extremely fortunate to have such an amazing support group of cheerleaders by both our sides.
We have also created a caring bridge website to help provide more background on how we came to this diagnosis and to also have one place for people who want to keep up on my progress throughout this year since it is hard to update everyone.
