Interview with Pamilla DeLeon-Lewis, “Empowering Women with Breast Cancer,” on Oct. 27, 1PM Pacific

Interview with Pamilla DeLeon-Lewis, “Empowering Women with Breast Cancer,” on Oct. 27, 1PM Pacific – blogtalkradio.com/kindethics

This will be an amazing interview with an amazing woman. She is one of my heroes.

http://www.pamilladeleon-lewis.com

Pamilla is the CEO/Founder of the Caribbean American Breast Cancer Organization (CabcoUSA) and she wears several hats. This quintessential woman is the daughter of the late great award winning calypso legend, Rafael deLeon aka The Roaring Lion. She is a breast cancer survivor and an award winning poet and author, and the ‘Woman of the Year 2006;’ she is on the Board of Advisors at SUNY Downstate Hospital, Brooklyn, New York, and is dedicating her efforts to empower the Caribbean and African American Community in its fight against cancer.Through her confrontational poetry, her songwriting, her motivational speaking, and through media she boldly challenges the enemy, by literally laughing at cancer daily. Chuckling Choonks is a Certified Laughter Yoga Teacher affiliated with Dr. Madan Kataria’s School of Laughter Yoga and a Certified Coach Practitioner.
This breast cancer activist is also a Brooklyn Team Leader of the Legislative Ambassador for the American Cancer Society.

She has two books available. Her recent book, “Side Effects – The Untold Story,” is available on Amazon. For more information go to www.pamilladeleonlewis.com. Her award winning Book of the Year- 2005 is a Life-affirming triumph over breast cancer chronicled ” Smiling Thru the Tears: A Breast Cancer Survivor Odyssey” By Pamela deLeon-Lewis

ISBN: 1413770703 PublishAmerica Smiling

Thru the Tears is a collection of over 100 poems documenting Pamela deLeon-Lewis’ journey through, and eventual triumph over, breast cancer. If the cover, which shows a smiling and radiantly healthy-looking young woman is any indication, she’s doing well. Indeed, one is startled to learn, through these poems, that deLeon-Lewis is in her 50s, and a grandmother. The cycle begins with intimations of wrongness as the poet attributes the beginning of her cancer to her father’s death and the stress of 9/1 1 which sent her career as a consultant into disarray. She even dreams of being told she has cancer. Yet, when the news comes in real life, it’s a shocker. She writes in “Dream Becomes Reality”: “I knew there was something wrong; Daily the signs were getting so strong.” The resulting poems confirm and reaffirm her absolute faith in God. Some of them read like prayers or Psalms. A series of wonderfully angry poems shout her defiance in the face of life-threatening illness, as in the lines of “I’ll Stand Tall”: “But I refuse to stoop to you. You can’t conquer me at all.” She refers to the cancer itself as DeMon, a play, one guesses, on “demon” and “The Man,” the oppressor, the thing that’s out to do her in. There are homages to friends, to the “Chemo Squad” and the “Radiation Squad.” Yet while she lauds the help of her squads, she doesn’t spare the reader the agony of her treatment: “I had sores in my mouth; I couldn’t eat. Pains in my legs, my feet, and my hands; I had pains in my eyes, pains in my head. So much pain it was blowing my mind,” (from “I Remember … Part I.”)

There are poems of gratitude for the medical team that helped her, her daughters, her grandchildren, her aunties, her mother, her dead father, her neighbor, her younger daughter’s babysitter, the folks in a cancer support chatroom, Oprah Winfrey (“Ms. Oprah Winfrey is positively the world’s greatest incentive for me”) and even a stranger who smiles at her on the street, and poems. There are poems that remind the reader that the aftermath of even a successful battle against breast cancer is hard. She still has pain, she can’t lift her right arm, and the treatment even damaged her brain. Some poems contemplate what it’s like to have one’s right breast amputated (she used to refer to her breast as “lost”). When we learn that the doctors have found a calcification in her left breast, the suspense is comparable to anything in a murder mystery novel. Our relief when we find out that all is well is thorough. The book ends with a poem by her grandson, Jahlani Andrew Roberts: “I am happy to say she is now Cancer Free!!! Now she has time to hang with me.” Smiling Thru Tears is a triumphant, life-affirming book.