In 2013, Jennifer Glass was diagnosed with stage IIIB lung cancer. To help document her life, she took a photo every day and then, in March 2014, she set it to music and uploaded it to YouTube. Since then, the video has been viewed more than 345,000 times, by people around the world. This is her story.
How It Happened: The day I was diagnosed, it was a Saturday. The doctor called us at home and initially he said, ‘You have stage IV lung cancer.’ We didn’t know if it had spread to my brain and my bones. We didn’t know a lot. We just knew we were going to be in for a rough ride.
The first several months were really just about getting through the treatment. I lost my hair. I felt crummy. I didn’t think so much about what was going to happen in the long term. I just wanted to do the treatment and then find out where we were. At the end of the treatment, the tests showed that it had been effective. The tumors had shrunk. Then I went on this drug that had really profound side effects. If you saw in the video, I had a terrible facial rash. That’s one of the common side effects of that drug at the high dose. It was a few months while we played with the dose and found a way for me to tolerate it.
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Jennifer Glass is a writer, speaker and advocate for aid in dying. See more at jenglass.com.
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