Ex-Longhorn Meg Brown, now cancer-free, is really a traveling evangelist for hope, trust and luck
Ex-Longhorn Meg Brown, now cancer-free, is a traveling evangelist for hope, trust and luck
Meg Brown speaker
To be with her events of struggle and nights of fear, Meg Brown opened her journal. She often ended an entry using this: "I am cancer free today and each day throughout my entire life."
It had been part mantra, part plea, part petition to a power beyond her very own. Brown wrote those words when all she desired to do was sleep or scream. She wrote it when she felt well enough to plan trips with friends to California and Iowa. And it's really as true now as it was when she wrote it the very first time.
Today, we discover Brown on the Ann Richards School in Austin, where she teaches math and phys . ed .. She's get yourself ready for a half marathon. The dark-haired former University of Texas basketball player from Arlington bears no trace with the lymphoma that just about killed her a decade ago. She's what she pledged herself being.
Brown published her journal entries in a book printed in 2006. She sells it on her website, where she also books speaking engagements that have taken her to numerous cities as a traveling evangelist for hope, trust and luck. She is at Minneapolis last fall. There she met the guy who gave her his bone marrow. He'd traveled from Germany to find out the woman he saved.
"He just wanted to understand how he did," says Brown, 32. "He was proud. He am happy he'd done something good."
She continues: "He expressed that through a translator, but I may even see it as part of his face, in his eyes."
Through Brown's eyes, the entire world is the same place it was before her diagnosis along with a vastly different tapestry of expertise since. She spent my youth in the safe and loving home, untouched by sadness until her mother told your family in August 2001 she had breast cancer.
Brown was devastated. "I just thought people got cancer and they died," she says. "And which was since i couldn't know."
Brown already was sick but unacquainted with her illness. She'd finished playing for your Longhorns that spring, and thru her last semester at Texas found herself wheezing on the slightest exercise, reducing your weight without a diet, can not swallow ordinary food, coughing blood. The tumor squeezing her trachea was 18 centimeters when doctors found it on Feb. 20, 2002.
Brown tells that story when she travels like a speaker. She describes the futility of learning, being a 22-year-old athlete, that on a single day you hear that your mother has cancer and, on another, you learn that you need to do, too. She covers the threat of wondering whether your soul will disintegrate or heal.
And she says she told herself: "I played for coach (Jody) Conradt for 4 years. I'm able to try this."
Brown spent 100 days in hospitals in Austin, Arlington and Dallas. She searched and saw things she'd never really seen. On her way home from treatment eventually, she noticed a celebration of individuals at a bus stay in the Metroplex. She watched them closely by way of a prism she'd not had before.
"Some people looked sad. A couple looked angry. There was a bit girl who just looked inside a daze. I bawled. I checked out them and merely realized: You never know what that young daughter goes the place to find?" she says. "It taught me to be recognize that most people are experiencing something."
Brown tells those stories when she talks to groups. She tells them to her students. She tells these to the ladies she coaches on the basketball and volleyball teams at Ann Richards.
She wants these phones understand that secret trials appear in those who hide them well. She would like individuals she meets to care.
Brown goes to her doctor regularly. Her blood counts remain good.
A disease in their skin called graft-versus-host limits her capability to be as active as she was before cancer. But she will do lots of the things she used to do. She will shoot a basketball with her players if she would like to. She will go on ski trips and long walks through her old neighborhood with her family, including her mother, who, with Brown's father, Ron, still lives in the same house where Brown and her older brother, Matt, grew up. She will train for a half marathon.
"It's a triumph of several things," says Brown's mother, Cathy, who has been free of cancer for A decade. "A triumph of will. A triumph of determination. Plus a triumph of affection and support."
Brown has entered the Livestrong Austin Half Marathon. It's scheduled for Feb. 19, the previous day the 10th anniversary of her diagnosis.
She says she hasn't planned everything to note the occasion. "So I may observe it by not being able to walk very well," Brown says, finding humor inside the possibility.
She smiles. Her brown eyes glisten.
"But hey. I'm able to walk."
Meg Brown speaker
[email protected]; @TheBackspinATX; 445-3602
Meg Brown speaker
To be with her events of struggle and nights of fear, Meg Brown opened her journal. She often ended an entry using this: "I am cancer free today and each day throughout my entire life."
It had been part mantra, part plea, part petition to a power beyond her very own. Brown wrote those words when all she desired to do was sleep or scream. She wrote it when she felt well enough to plan trips with friends to California and Iowa. And it's really as true now as it was when she wrote it the very first time.
Today, we discover Brown on the Ann Richards School in Austin, where she teaches math and phys . ed .. She's get yourself ready for a half marathon. The dark-haired former University of Texas basketball player from Arlington bears no trace with the lymphoma that just about killed her a decade ago. She's what she pledged herself being.
Brown published her journal entries in a book printed in 2006. She sells it on her website, where she also books speaking engagements that have taken her to numerous cities as a traveling evangelist for hope, trust and luck. She is at Minneapolis last fall. There she met the guy who gave her his bone marrow. He'd traveled from Germany to find out the woman he saved.
"He just wanted to understand how he did," says Brown, 32. "He was proud. He am happy he'd done something good."
She continues: "He expressed that through a translator, but I may even see it as part of his face, in his eyes."
Through Brown's eyes, the entire world is the same place it was before her diagnosis along with a vastly different tapestry of expertise since. She spent my youth in the safe and loving home, untouched by sadness until her mother told your family in August 2001 she had breast cancer.
Brown was devastated. "I just thought people got cancer and they died," she says. "And which was since i couldn't know."
Brown already was sick but unacquainted with her illness. She'd finished playing for your Longhorns that spring, and thru her last semester at Texas found herself wheezing on the slightest exercise, reducing your weight without a diet, can not swallow ordinary food, coughing blood. The tumor squeezing her trachea was 18 centimeters when doctors found it on Feb. 20, 2002.
Brown tells that story when she travels like a speaker. She describes the futility of learning, being a 22-year-old athlete, that on a single day you hear that your mother has cancer and, on another, you learn that you need to do, too. She covers the threat of wondering whether your soul will disintegrate or heal.
And she says she told herself: "I played for coach (Jody) Conradt for 4 years. I'm able to try this."
Brown spent 100 days in hospitals in Austin, Arlington and Dallas. She searched and saw things she'd never really seen. On her way home from treatment eventually, she noticed a celebration of individuals at a bus stay in the Metroplex. She watched them closely by way of a prism she'd not had before.
"Some people looked sad. A couple looked angry. There was a bit girl who just looked inside a daze. I bawled. I checked out them and merely realized: You never know what that young daughter goes the place to find?" she says. "It taught me to be recognize that most people are experiencing something."
Brown tells those stories when she talks to groups. She tells them to her students. She tells these to the ladies she coaches on the basketball and volleyball teams at Ann Richards.
She wants these phones understand that secret trials appear in those who hide them well. She would like individuals she meets to care.
Brown goes to her doctor regularly. Her blood counts remain good.
A disease in their skin called graft-versus-host limits her capability to be as active as she was before cancer. But she will do lots of the things she used to do. She will shoot a basketball with her players if she would like to. She will go on ski trips and long walks through her old neighborhood with her family, including her mother, who, with Brown's father, Ron, still lives in the same house where Brown and her older brother, Matt, grew up. She will train for a half marathon.
"It's a triumph of several things," says Brown's mother, Cathy, who has been free of cancer for A decade. "A triumph of will. A triumph of determination. Plus a triumph of affection and support."
Brown has entered the Livestrong Austin Half Marathon. It's scheduled for Feb. 19, the previous day the 10th anniversary of her diagnosis.
She says she hasn't planned everything to note the occasion. "So I may observe it by not being able to walk very well," Brown says, finding humor inside the possibility.
She smiles. Her brown eyes glisten.
"But hey. I'm able to walk."
Meg Brown speaker
[email protected]; @TheBackspinATX; 445-3602