3X Young Adult Cancer Survivor & friend nominated for Glamour’s woman of the year

"Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional!"

My friend Rachel Baumgartner Lozano made the top 5 of Glamour's "Woman of the year" award. She's a 3-time survivor of Askin's tumor of the spinal cord (a malignant sarcoma that is a small-cell tumor of the soft tissues in the thoracopulmonary area). The doctors' prognosis after her relapse weren't very good (what an understatement). Quite honestly, she was given months to live. Everyone else who ever had Askin's Tumor and relapsed after a transplant had died within weeks. Click here for more of her story!

People say that there are 2 ways to react once you got diagnosed with cancer:

1. survive and then try to ignore you ever had cancer and try to live your life just like you did prior to the diagnosis
2. fight like hell, survive, and then become active in the fight against cancer. Telling your story so that others can benefit from your experiences, advocate on a local, state or national level to improve cancer research and early detection, etc.
   

Obviously, Rachel chose the second option. Not only did she survive (which is a miracle all in itself), she became actively involved in seven cancer charities. Rachel is an advocate and a great role model for young adult survivors and warriors, an artist, a university student following her dreams (Yahoo!) and just a very inspiring young woman. There are still lots of ups and downs emotionally and psychologically and physically, I won't tell you her life is a piece off cake now that she's a survivor, because it's not, but does she ever impersonate the quote mentioned above.

Rachel is an advocate for the LAF (she was invited by the LAF to be one of the two delegates from the state of Missouri in May 2007 to address members of Congress in support of increased funding for cancer research), she started her own blog after attending the 2006 summit in Austin: http://iamobsessedwithlife.blogspot.com and recently, she served as an honorary ambassador for The Wellness Community walk.

If you know anyone who might like to vote for her, please pass along the link- and don't forget to vote right now. You can vote for her once a day:
https://secure.glamour.com/magazine/sweeps/woman_of_the_year_2008/entry/long/

From one hypothyroid girl to another: You ROCK, Rach, and I'm glad to know you. Even though you couldn't make it to the summit this year, we'll meet some other time!