ON ANNIVERSARY OF HER OWN DIAGNOSIS, FACEBOOK EXECUTIVE LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN TO BRING ATTENTION TO FOLLICULAR LYMPHOMA – Bing video
In November 2016, Sometimes when you live a hectic life you neglect your life and forget how to take care of yourself. Her American colleagues’ political problems were very far from her mind. Mendelsohn had discovered an unusual lump near her groin. She didn’t think anything of it, but a doctor suggested she get a scan. That Friday, she put her phone down and came back to see missed call after missed call from her doctor. She knew the news couldn’t be good.
She spiraled, imagining the very worst, thinking about what she would tell her four kids.
“I felt a physical feeling that this is really bad—like you’ve been hit in the solar plexus,”
she remembers. The results were as bad as she feared: The small lump was one of several tumors all over her body. She had follicular lymphoma, an incurable blood cancer that 25,000 Americans are diagnosed with each year.
That was almost seven years ago.
After that horrible weekend, Mendelsohn vowed never to feel that hopeless again. Her doctor first monitored her cancer’s progression, then she began treatment that continued until the pandemic, when Mendelsohn isolated at home because of her weakened immune system. Now, at age 51, she has no evidence of disease, and advocates for patients with the under-researched and underfunded illness.
A cancer diagnosis can be a clarifying experience that prompts patients to reorder their lives. Work can become an afterthought. Mendelsohn also had that moment of clarity, except her diagnosis reinforced that she wanted to keep things as they were. She loved her life; her ad savvy aligned with Facebook’s purported mission to connect the world—a cause she deeply believes in.
Her theater-kid energy had endeared her to colleagues and London’s creative community.
“People want Nicola to win,” says Michael Kassan, the well-connected CEO of MediaLink, a strategic advisory firm. Throughout the ordeal, Mendelsohn kept working and continued to climb the ranks at Facebook, and now Meta. This February, Meta promoted Mendelsohn to head of its global business group, an influential job handling relationships with the large advertisers that contributed the bulk of Meta’s $114 billion in ad revenue last year.
She also oversees its partnership network and global business engineering team. With the departures of executives like Sandberg and Marne Levine, Mendelsohn, who reports to COO Javier Olivan, has become one of the most senior women at the global tech giant.
In her eight years as vice president of EMEA, Mendelsohn oversaw 1,500% revenue growth to almost $28 billion annually. (Facebook recorded 1,700% growth in the same period.) She opened new offices and set up business operations in Norway, Israel, and South Africa. Mendelsohn centralized various “Africa” initiatives, from broadband access to user growth, to launch Facebook’s first office on the continent; in Israel, she capitalized on the startup culture to build products for small companies.
Along the way, Mendelsohn earned the respect of her bosses and her more technical colleagues. In addition to maintaining relationships with advertisers, she liaised between those customers and Facebook engineering teams, suggesting new features and products. “She understands our products. She understands the metrics. She understands what advertisers are looking for. But she also understands people and what makes them click,” says Sandberg, Mendelsohn’s former boss and Meta’s COO until she stepped down last August.
Mendelsohn never planned to go into the advertising business.
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Mendelsohn became indispensable, weighing in on matters beyond her purview;
while the 2020 advertiser boycott was a U.S. issue, her industry expertise from Europe made her a critical strategist in Facebook’s response. Nick Clegg, the U.K. deputy prime minister turned Facebook president of global affairs, remembers Mendelsohn’s ability to distinguish between general media uproar over Facebook’s role in politics and the key issues that advertisers wanted addressed, like their content appearing next to hate speech. “Some people might get into a tailspin. Others just shrug their shoulders,” Clegg says. “[She could] see wood for the trees.”
RELATED: What It’s Like Living With Incurable Cancer | GLAMOUR UK – YouTube
So well articulated. Brilliant attitude to overcoming FL.
Your strength, determination, love and admiration of those close to you will be with you on this journey. That strength, courage, honesty and warmth has completely blown me away. Beyond inspiring and interviewed so beautifully and sensitively by you Deborah Joseph… A true warrior & inspiration to others – your resilience and strength is amazing much love to you both xoxo
Perfect post for lots of follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma warriors loved it.
Only three years into her tenure at Facebook in 2016, Mendelsohn had made a name for herself. So when she received her diagnosis, she had allies in her corner. Mendelsohn’s “legendary energy,” as Clegg describes it, hasn’t faltered throughout our conversation at Meta’s NYC office. Until we get to a big topic: her cancer. Mendelsohn’s voice drops into
a lower register; she gets quieter and sits back in her chair.
She’s told the story of her diagnosis before—to her bosses, to her employees, to supporters of the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation she started. But remembering the first time she told her four children gives her pause. She rests her head in her hands.
A week after Mendelsohn’s diagnosis, she and Jonathan sat the kids down around their dining room table in London. Her oldest child and only daughter, Gabi, was 20; her youngest son, Zac, was 11. “He was so little,” Mendelsohn remembers, her voice wavering. They had waited a week to figure out all the facts and so as not to ruin an elder son’s birthday party.
They told the kids that their mom had cancer. “I couldn’t get the words out,” Mendelsohn remembers. “Everything was happening in slow motion.” They couldn’t comfort the family by saying she would start treatment right away; her doctors recommended treating the cancer only when it progresses to a certain point. Zac asked if their mom was going to die.
The question was impossible to answer. Follicular lymphoma is considered incurable.
No chemotherapy can ever guarantee that the cancer is entirely gone. Half of patients diagnosed make it five years; one-third live another 15 years.
After its initial slow progression, the disease “takes off” in the lymph nodes and bone marrow, explains Dr. Jonathan Simons, an oncologist and former professor of hematology who helped Mendelsohn establish the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation. For 18 months, Mendelsohn’s diagnosis was a fact of life as she and her family waited for doctors’
go-ahead to start treatment.
She couldn’t do anything besides improve her diet and start exercising
(boxing, walking, dancing). After she began chemotherapy, Mendelsohn didn’t have the stereotypical experience. Her long, thick hair thinned, but she never had to wear the wig she bought in anticipation of losing all of it. And she didn’t take time off work.
She says she never considered it even as Facebook endured the public’s wrath.
She brought her laptop to treatment sessions and conducted meetings virtually. (She’s co founded a pledge to support workers battling cancer with Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun.) She was determined to maintain the life she’d built—at home and at work—despite the diagnosis: “Still married to the same guy, same job,” she jokes.
The pandemic cut short the final stage of her treatment—immunotherapy.
She isolated in her London home, including from her youngest son when he went back to school. Her low B-cell count meant that COVID vaccines didn’t work on her. In April 2021 she received a drug that produced synthetic antibodies, allowing her to get back outside.
Later that year she was promoted from VP of EMEA to VP of the global business group, a precursor to her current role, and moved to New York. She’s had no evidence of the cancer since 2018, but the nature of follicular lymphoma means the word “remission” doesn’t really apply.
Mendelsohn says her dedication to Facebook was less about furthering her career and more about advancing the company’s mission. For the ultimate people person, the possibilities that come with reaching 3 billion people each day were hard to give up.
She’s a true believer in the good that can come from connecting people, a throwback to the earliest days of social media before the risks—fast-moving misinformation, the spread of hate speech—became clear. She finds meaning in supporting businesses, providing U.S. advertisers with $3.31 in revenue for every dollar they spend on Meta platform ads.
“These are the kinds of numbers that get me and my team out of bed every day,”
she told the press in May. This year has tested even the most ardent Meta supporter.
After a COVID-era boom, the global advertising market has contracted, and Meta’s revenue growth has slowed.
In mid-2022, Meta reported a decline in year-over-year revenue for the first time since its 2012 IPO. The 1% year-over-year dip—accompanied by a 36% drop in profit—was a wake-up call. CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.” Translation: layoffs.
Meta has initiated at least four separate rounds of cuts since November, slashing more than 21,000 workers, about 24% of its workforce. Meta also faces threats that will outlast the calendar year. Its platforms are losing relevance among younger generations enraptured by rival TikTok.
More generally, users have grown distrustful of social media; content from influencers and brands—not friends—floods their feeds. It’s possible that the social part of the social media era—which Facebook pioneered—has peaked.
That heavy question is for Zuckerberg to ponder.
Mendelsohn is chipping away at the smaller, operational challenges on her plate.
In May, Meta’s layoffs hit the business groups where Mendelsohn is a leader alongside Justin Osofsky, who oversees smaller businesses. She responded to low worker morale (made worse by the cuts’ staggered rollout) by spinning the focus on efficiency as a return to the good old days of Facebook.
“This is kind of getting us back to our roots, getting us back to being much more agile, much nimbler,” she says. Meta can now “create and innovate new products in new and faster ways than we’ve done before.” Outside Meta, the economic outlook is grim too. Worldwide digital ad spending is forecast to reach $601 billion this year, but the pace
of growth is slowing, according to Insider Intelligence.
Between Facebook and Instagram, Meta eats up 20% of advertisers’ digital budget.
In a downturn, they want proof that that strategy is paying off. Executives at Meta’s regular Global Client Council meetings of 25 top advertisers—which Mendelsohn hosts—once focused on hate speech.
Now they’re concerned about the return on their investment. “Where do we spend our money? How do we spend our money most effectively? Is it Facebook, Instagram Reels,
or TikTok?” asks Lindsay Pattison, chief client officer for the British advertising and communications firm WPP.
A 2020 privacy tweak by Apple has made that gloomy ad climate worse.
That year, Apple sent iOS users a prompt that asked if they wanted to be tracked when using Facebook and other apps. Meta estimated that such policies would cost it $10 billion in revenue. It has automated more of the advertising experience, helping to offset the cost for advertisers. Still, Mendelsohn goes after Apple: “A number of different businesses have cited bankruptcy [because] they weren’t able to target their customers directly,” she says, citing a hypothetical small-town pizza shop. But the Apple changes “impacted our business as well,” she acknowledges. Then there’s TikTok.
If the ByteDance-owned app can figure out how to monetize at the same level as Meta, it will earn billions more each year. “Could that come at the expense of someone else?” asks Bernstein Research analyst Mark Shmulik. “You just can’t ignore it, because they’re not standing still over at TikTok.”
Mendelsohn says she’s focused on increasing value for advertisers:
“They’re coming where they can get the growth, and they get that from us.” Meta is hardly ignoring TikTok, yet some of its efforts to compete with the app may be cannibalizing its own business. Videos posted on Reels, Meta’s answer to TikTok, are longer than Stories, which means fewer opportunities to play ads in between posts—and lower monetization.
Yet Meta claims users are watching more Reels—140 billion plays a day across Instagram and Facebook—and spending less time on the feed, which cuts into ad revenue. Mendelsohn says Facebook saw the same pattern when it introduced Stories, which initially monetized at a lower level than static image posts. Instagram Reels’ monetization efficiency improved 30% last quarter, Zuckerberg said in Meta’s most recent earnings report.
“[Meta is] in a pivotal moment—revenue growth has stalled.
They’re not growing. They’re having massive cuts,” says Jefferies analyst Brent Thill. “They’re trying to experiment with new business models. But at the end of the day, the main engine is advertising, which is a really tough place right now given the economy.” Mendelsohn says Zuckerberg’s new obsession—A.I.—can help solve those problems in small ways. The average Meta advertiser saw 20% higher conversions in the fourth quarter of 2022 mainly because of A.I., she says.
In May, Meta announced the planned rollout of its “A.I. Sandbox” of tools: A.I. that adjusts brightness and text placement to increase ad performance, plus generative A.I. that writes copy and creates image backgrounds. Automating the nitty-gritty lets marketers spend more time on the skills that give them a “competitive advantage,” like developing campaigns and targeting the right users.
After months of disappointing earnings, Meta delivered good news in April.
It reported 3% year-over-year sales growth, its first increase in almost a year and a sign it’s rebounding from the blow of Apple’s rule change and beginning to gain market share in short-form video. Today, Mendelsohn’s cancer isn’t all-consuming. “Now I don’t think about it every day,” she says.
“That’s something I never could have imagined when I was diagnosed.” What she does think about is finding a cure for follicular lymphoma, something she “absolutely” expects in her lifetime. A cure could be applied to other diseases that share follicular lymphoma’s DNA structure, like breast cancer. Simons calls Mendelsohn the “Michael J. Fox of follicular lymphoma.” The visibility—and money—a top Meta exec can bring to an under-resourced disease could change the lives of the 1.2 million people with this illness.
Still, a question looms: What if researchers don’t find a cure? Follicular lymphoma
recurs in the average patient six to eight times, with increasing frequency. Mendelsohn is encouraged that her disease hasn’t returned for five years. Her young age at the time of her diagnosis makes her “not the typical follicular lymphoma patient,” which gives her hope that the other stats won’t apply either.
Mendelsohn’s upbeat outlook can at times feel at odds with the prospects in front of her. She’s not sure where the disposition comes from—“I’ve just always felt incredibly grateful, from being a child,” she says—but says it’s a by-product of focusing on what she can control, rather than “the very big thing.” That approach makes the challenges on her plate—whether living with cancer or the future of one of the world’s largest tech companies—a little easier to handle.
Today she flies around the world every week. She jetted between New York, Israel, Palo Alto, and King Charles III’s coronation in a one-month span this year. She set a goal to visit 100 countries, and crossed the 100th off her list with a holiday vacation to St. Lucia. And she remains as committed to the future of Meta as ever, metaverse included.
“I can’t imagine being anywhere else,” she says. “I love Mark’s vision of where the next stage will get us to.” Mendelsohn says. “I’m getting on with my life,” ‘Online and off. “
This article appears in the June/July 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline,
“Meta’s true believer.” This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Can Using This Popular Sweetener Damage Your DNA? (msn.com)
Now she oversees the bulk of Meta’s $114 billion in ad revenue each year as head of its global business group. Only three years into her tenure at Facebook in 2016, Mendelsohn had made a name for herself. So when she received her diagnosis, she had allies in her corner.
Mendelsohn’s “legendary energy,” as Clegg describes it, hasn’t faltered throughout our conversation at Meta’s NYC office. Until we get to a big topic: her cancer. Mendelsohn’s voice drops into a lower register; she gets quieter and sits back in her chair.
She’s told the story of her diagnosis before—to her bosses, to her employees, to supporters of the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation she started. But remembering the first time she told her four children gives her pause. She rests her head in her hands. A week after Mendelsohn’s diagnosis, she and Jonathan sat the kids down around their dining room table in London. Her oldest child and only daughter, Gabi, was 20; her youngest son, Zac, was 11.
“He was so little,” Mendelsohn remembers, her voice wavering. They had waited a week to figure out all the facts and so as not to ruin an elder son’s birthday party. They told the kids that their mom had cancer. “I couldn’t get the words out,” Mendelsohn remembers. “Everything was happening in slow motion.” They couldn’t comfort the family by saying she would start treatment right away; her doctors recommended treating the cancer only when it progresses to a certain point.
Zac asked if their mom was going to die.
The question was impossible to answer.
Follicular lymphoma is considered incurable. No chemotherapy can ever guarantee that the cancer is entirely gone. Half of patients diagnosed make it five years; one-third live another 15 years. After its initial slow progression, the disease “takes off” in the lymph nodes and bone marrow, explains Dr. Jonathan Simons, an oncologist and former professor of hematology who helped Mendelsohn establish the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation.
For 18 months, Mendelsohn’s diagnosis was a fact of life as she and her family waited for doctors’ go-ahead to start treatment. She couldn’t do anything besides improve her diet and start exercising (boxing, walking, dancing). After she began chemotherapy, Mendelsohn didn’t have the stereotypical experience. Her long, thick hair thinned, but she never had to wear the wig she bought in anticipation of losing all of it. And she didn’t take time off work.
She says she never considered it even as Facebook endured the public’s wrath. She brought her laptop to treatment sessions and conducted meetings virtually. (She’s co founded a pledge to support workers battling cancer with Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun.) She was determined to maintain the life she’d built—at home and at work—despite the diagnosis: “Still married to the same guy, same job,” she jokes.
The pandemic cut short the final stage of her treatment—immunotherapy. She isolated in her London home, including from her youngest son when he went back to school. Her low B-cell count meant that COVID vaccines didn’t work on her. In April 2021 she received a drug that produced synthetic antibodies, allowing her to get back outside.
Later that year she was promoted from VP of EMEA to VP of the global business group, a precursor to her current role, and moved to New York. She’s had no evidence of the cancer since 2018, but the nature of follicular lymphoma means the word “remission” doesn’t really apply.
Today, Mendelsohn’s cancer isn’t all-consuming.
“Now I don’t think about it every day,” she says. “That’s something I never could have imagined when I was diagnosed.” What she does think about is finding a cure for follicular lymphoma, something she “absolutely” expects in her lifetime. A cure could be applied to other diseases that share follicular lymphoma’s DNA structure, like breast cancer. Simons calls Mendelsohn the “Michael J. Fox of follicular lymphoma.”
The visibility—and money—a top Meta exec can bring to an under-resourced disease could change the lives of the 1.2 million people with this illness. Still, a question looms: What if researchers don’t find a cure? Follicular lymphoma recurs in the average patient six to eight times, with increasing frequency. Mendelsohn is encouraged that her disease hasn’t returned for five years.
Her young age at the time of her diagnosis makes her “not the typical follicular lymphoma patient,” which gives her hope that the other stats won’t apply either. Mendelsohn’s upbeat outlook can at times feel at odds with the prospects in front of her. She’s not sure where the disposition comes from—“I’ve just always felt incredibly grateful, from being a child,” she says—but says it’s a by-product of focusing on what she can control, rather than “the very big thing.”
That approach makes the challenges on her plate—whether living with cancer or the future of one of the world’s largest tech companies—a little easier to handle. What it’s like living with an incurable cancer. Diagnosed with an incurable cancer on November 18 2016, Nicola Mendelsohn tells GLAMOUR’s EIC (who happens to be her sister-in-law) why she’s making it her mission to find a cure.
By Deborah Joseph
2 April 2023
World Cancer Day, held every 4 February, is the global uniting initiative led by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) to raise awareness and improve education around cancer and reimagine a world where millions of preventable cancer deaths are saved and access to life-saving cancer treatment and care is equitable for all – no matter who you are or where you live.
Created in 2000, World Cancer Day has grown into a positive movement for everyone, everywhere to unite under one voice to face one of our greatest challenges in history.
To mark the day, we are revising an interview we did with Nicola Mendelsohn, who tells GLAMOUR’s EIC (who happens to be her sister-in-law) why she’s making it her mission to find a cure.
Follicular Lymphoma. You know that blood cancer affects around one million people globally. The disease that often has no visible symptoms. The cancer that hangs like a life sentence over those who have it, even though they can look as healthy as you and me. Still no idea what I’m talking about? Don’t worry. It’s not you. It’s cancer. Follicular Lymphoma is the incurable cancer we’ve all never even heard of.
The one that wrecks lives, renders those living with it powerless. And one previously believed too rare to be worthy of a cure. That is, until Nicola Mendelsohn, the super boss, VP of Facebook EMEA, mother of four – and for full disclosure – my sister-in-law, was diagnosed with it three years ago, after finding a pea-sized lump in her groin. “I didn’t have any other symptoms,” she recalls. “I was busy living life, busy with work, busy with the kids. I called a friend who’s a doctor and she said, ‘Lumps come and go on women.
If it’s still there in three weeks’ time, come and see me.”
It was still there, so Nicola was sent for a CT scan. “After the scan I went home and didn’t think anything else of it, until a few hours later, when I saw I had a lot of missed calls from the doctor who’d done the scan, but also my friend. I remember telling my husband Jon,
I think this is bad news. My friend called and asked if I’d spoken to the other doctor.
When I said no, she said, ‘I’m coming round’. She told me they’d found tumors up and down the inside of my body.”
As it was a weekend, no further tests could be done. “We decided not to tell anyone, until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And it was also the weekend of my eldest son, Danny’s 18th birthday. It was the worst weekend of my life. I wasn’t thinking rationally, it was horrendous. I thought of all the worst things that could happen. I lost half a stone in weight from worrying, and not sleeping and crying and trying to put a facade of normal on.”
Within a week she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin Follicular Lymphoma, the most common of the non-Hodgkin cancers, but one which most people can barely pronounce. “I was lucky to be diagnosed very quickly, which is very unusual for a blood cancer,” she recalls. “It can often take up to three years, with the person getting sicker. Especially for women, the symptoms often get passed off as, oh you’re tired, you must be too busy, or, oh you’re getting hot sweats at night, it must be the menopause. But sometimes, these symptoms can actually be blood cancer.”
“Telling my children was very hard,” she says, with tears in her eyes.
“It’s difficult even retelling it now. It was a Sunday morning, eight days after I’d been diagnosed. We got the kids together. I was very emotional, I could barely get my words out. Jon was very helpful. The kids just looked so sad. Zac, my youngest, who was 11 at the time, looked at me and said, ‘Are you going to die, mum?’
My response was, I’m going to try my very best not to.
But I didn’t lie to him. All the advice says you should be as honest as possible with your children.” She was also extremely honest with her friends, family, and also, her employer, Facebook.
The diagnosis was naturally shocking and devastating for everyone who knew her well, of course, but also for those who knew of her through her work. For a businesswoman with such a high-profile position to be so open about living with an incurable cancer is unusual. I will never forget the day Nicola came to my home to tell me, and my husband, her brother to tell us her news. We were shell-shocked.
But she led the way.
She was tearful but remained strong, focused and most of all, positive. Where did she find that strength from? “I think I found the most support and strength from getting on with my normal life. Just getting on and doing the things I’ve always done.” As her sister-in-law – we wondered if she’d take a step back, slow down at work. “That was never going to happen” she laughs.
“Facebook was incredibly supportive. They told me to do whatever I needed to do. Take as much time off as I need. But for me taking time off would have been the worst thing for me. I’d just sit at home thinking about my own mortality. I wanted to keep working as much as I possibly could. So they’ve treated me pretty much as normal because they’ve taken their cues from me.“
Nicola expected to head straight into chemotherapy, but was advised against it at the time. “Initially, my mindset was all around, I’ve got to beat this. When you hear about cancer, you hear about cutting it out and blasting it, and then you’ll get better” she says. “But the more I researched into the course of initial treatment, I discovered something called ‘watch and wait’. Which means not doing anything at all and letting the doctors assess the progression of the cancer. At that point they think you’ll need treatment, then they’ll suggest it. There is no change in the overall life expectancy if you treat now, or treat in the future, it doesn’t make any difference.”
READ MORE: I beat cancer but had a breakdown when I got the all-clear
Nicola managed to go on ‘watch and wait’ for 18 months, by which point some of her tumors had grown dangerously close to her kidneys, and there was a concern it would give her kidney failure. “So I started treatment.” This, she will admit, was one of the hardest moments for her. “I’d created a false expectation for myself, that I wouldn’t need treatment for at least two years, so it was a blow.” For the past year, she has undergone fourteen rounds of chemotherapy and is currently on a two-year maintenance therapy, which involves immunotherapy every eight weeks.
One of the biggest ironies around this, is that despite this diagnosis, and the chemotherapy, Nicola looks better than she’s ever looked in her life. She doesn’t look ill. She isn’t living her life as an ill person, which is what, for some, makes this an invisible cancer. Thanks to a much healthier lifestyle, that has involved cutting out sugar from her diet – she used to eat more sweets than anyone she knows – reflexology, acupuncture, mindfulness and exercise – she looks incredible.
I did everything I could to make my body strong.
“I realize I’ve been very lucky in that I haven’t suffered from symptoms and also, didn’t react as badly as others to the chemotherapy, I didn’t lose my hair. I read a tip that if you bought your wig before your hair fell out it would be a nicer experience. My hair has thinned, but I’m very happy my wig is still hanging in my wardrobe, and I’ve never had to wear it. But I know the same can not be said for everyone who goes through the same treatment.”
As well as working her way through her diagnosis, she found an unexpected source of strength and support, also through Facebook. “About three months after I was diagnosed, I wonder if there’s a Facebook group for Follicular Lymphoma. I searched and lo and behold there was one called Living With Follicular Lymphoma. It had recently been set up by a woman called Nicky who lived in Australia. It had a few hundred members.
I contacted her and said, I think I can help. The group now has over six thousand members and is honestly the single best place for advice and support. It’s a place where people go to rant and know everyone in the group will one hundred percent understand what you’re going through.” Three years on from her diagnosis, Nicola has done what she always does with other areas of her life – tackled it head on.
She has decided to find a cure for her own cancer. “I decided if not me, then who and if not now, then when. So yes, the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation is now a thing. We have to raise a lot of money and also, raise awareness. So Follicular Lymphoma, Follicular Lymphoma…please remember those words.” The word inspiration is bandied around a lot these days, but really, to watch someone you love and admire remain so strong in the face of an incurable cancer, is truly incredible to witness.
How does she do it?
I will always be in awe of her ability to stay positive and focused and to keep perspective, no matter what. “You know, I’ve always felt very grateful for the life that I have. The family I have and the friends and opportunities that I have. I have always tried to squeeze into every day as much as is humanly possible. That’s how I love living my life and nothing has changed.
I saw the darkness of what happens when your mind starts to wander, it’s so easy to go down that spiral of what if. It’s hard to get out of that pit of despair once you go down it. It made me physically ill doing it. I’m not going to do that. However many weeks, months, years I have left, I’m going to live my best life possible. And I’m going to make it my mission to find a cure for Follicular Lymphoma to help others who are diagnosed with it now and in the future.”
For more info and details on how to donate visit..
Website www.theflf.org
Facebook: @FollicularLymphomaFoundation
Instagram: @FollicularLymphomaFoundation
Twitter: @Cure_FL
Hashtag across all channels: #CureFL