Carrie Wells refused to stop living her life when she was diagnosed with cancer. She met other cancer patients who feel like victims, but she didn’t want to live that way.

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I’m very thankful that I had an opportunity to be treated so well when I was going through my treatments? A lot of times I’ll meet cancer survivors and they’ll tell me they feel like a victim. that’s what I hear often. It’s been nine years, and I know that at the time I did feel like, why is this happening to me? I felt like I was a victim. I really did feel like someone was just marching over me and stomping me out, that there was nothing for me to do. But that was such a long time ago, and I’m not that person anymore, because I really didn’t let that diagnosis overtake me.

I really didn’t stop my life when I was told I had cancer. For And I’ve done so many things since that, and I think that’s that’s how I’m defined. More on my volunteer work or the walks that I do every year. Walking 40 miles, 60 miles, this year walking two walks. That’s more of me. And so to ask me about being a victim, I really don’t remember that as much anymore, because it’s really not in my life.

And sometimes it’s even hard when I volunteer to talk to people because they’re so upset and they feel like it’s the end of the road for them and it’s so hard for me to show them that it’s not. Because at that point, you can’t see that there’s another, that there is any way out. You become very short sighted.

You’re thinking of one treatment to the next, one procedure to the next, when can I eat my next meal when this procedure is over so I can have something to eat? Your life is so short term. And now my life is much more long term. I have so much more to look forward to just year after year with raising the money for the walks and participating with all the people that I know, getting my family to get involved with me, to walk with me, and that’s so important to me, to see them join in, because they’re not survivors of cancer, yet they join in and have just as much energy for it as I do.