Two Cancers Later, She Found a Better Word Than Resilient with Cheyenne Heflin

Cheyenne Heflin was thirteen years old, at her first ever sleepaway camp, when a soccer game left her with a knee injury that would not heal. Weeks later an x ray showed what her orthopaedist called an aggressive tumour, osteosarcoma, a bone cancer that would take her leg above the knee and put her through months of chemotherapy, including a drug nicknamed the Red Devil. She survived. But healing, she tells Bron, was not the neat return to normal everyone expected. She spent her teenage years in denial, masking that everything was fine, terrified to ask for help, until therapy and her father taught her a different way to speak the truth of how she was feeling. Then, thirteen years after her original diagnosis, and years into building a career around helping other paediatric cancer patients, the cancer came back, this time in her lung. Cheyenne and Bron talk about what changed the second time around: the word she has swapped in for resilient, the deliberate choice to keep living her whole life alongside treatment, and the box of funny hats her friends and grandmother sent her when she lost her hair again. This is a conversation about identity, about masking, about learning to ask for help, and about what it means to add the word and to your story rather than letting illness be the whole of it. In This Episode • The soccer game at her first sleepaway camp where a knee injury would not go away • The x ray on the light box, and the words "this is an aggressive tumor" that she still remembers word for word • Doxorubicin, nicknamed the Red Devil, and the toxic chemo regimen that came with an above knee amputation at thirteen • Starting a Catholic high school freshly amputated and still bald, and the social skills nobody teaches you after trauma • Masking as fine for years, and the moment her father pushed her to learn how to actually ask for help • Why she has retired the word resilient, and the word she uses instead to describe how she lives now • The recurrence at twenty-seven: a cough mistaken for asthma that turned out to be osteosarcoma in her lung • Losing her entire right lung, and hitting her lifetime dose of the chemo that once nearly broke her • The box of funny hats her friends and grandmother sent her before her second round of chemo • Adding the word and: I am a cancer survivor, and I am so much more than that • Her advice for parents and young people living through a diagnosis right now • What serenity means to Cheyenne, and why she has stopped waiting for the next bad thing to happen Make every day count my friends. Connect With Cheyenne Website: https://cheyenneheflin.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/ (/resilient_aka) resilient_aka (/resilient_aka) Connect With The Serenity Project Website: https://serenityproject.com.au (https://serenityproject.com.au/) Instagram: /bron_watson Facebook: /bronwatsonme LinkedIn: /bronwatson YouTube: /@bronwatson Have a question or feedback? You can leave a message here: https://fanlist.com/serenityproject