HOPE, It Will Not End with My Death: Twelve Years Learning to Live Paperback – February 22, 2026

After twelve years living with Stage IVb ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer, my Year 12 MRI showed resolution of five longstanding brain metastases.Hope: It Will Not End with My Death — Twelve Years Learning to Live is a literary medical memoir documenting one woman’s journey through metastatic cancer with faith, precision medicine, clinical trial participation, advocacy, and disciplined survivorship.Diagnosed in 2014, I entered a world defined by hospital lights, airway obstruction, radiation treatments, molecular profiling, targeted therapy, insurance appeals, financial strain, and relentless scan seasons. I learned to read radiology reports. I learned to ask better questions. I learned how to advocate through bureaucratic systems while fighting to preserve breath, stability, and dignity.This book is not a self-help manual.It is not a segmented devotional.It is not medical advice.It is a narrative oncology reflection and spiritual autobiography grounded in lived experience.Across twelve years, I navigated progression, stabilization, pleural effusions, brain metastases, systemic treatment, and ultimately enrollment in a next-generation clinical trial. In September 2024, I began participation in an investigational targeted therapy study. One month later, imaging revealed no visible enhancing intracranial lesions. This memoir does not make institutional claims. It reflects my independent personal journey within evolving cancer science.Through family reunions, quilting circles, financial barriers, pharmacy battles, ministry transitions, grief, skydiving declarations, hospital rehospitalizations, and everyday survival, this book explores what it means to integrate faith and medicine without placing them in opposition.You will not find tidy chapters labeled “lesson learned.”You will find the rhythm of real life — sometimes storm-like, sometimes sacred, often both in the same hour.This is a long-term metastatic survivorship narrative.It speaks to:• Survivors navigating advanced cancer• Caregivers carrying invisible weight• Clinicians who want to understand the lived reality behind scan results• Advocates fighting for access to treatment• Readers wrestling with hope under pressureAs a Black American woman living publicly with metastatic lung cancer, I also address representation in clinical research and the courage required to participate in evolving precision oncology.Hope did not arrive as denial.Hope did not cancel hard days.Hope became discipline.This book is about what happens when you refuse to surrender identity to diagnosis.Twelve years.Stage IVb.Brain metastases.Still living.Still writing.This is not a story about escaping death.It is a story about learning how to live — fully, honestly, and faithfully — inside uncertainty.Hope did not end.And neither did I. Read more