This post, written by Amber Paluch, features one of our original Delhi Dozen. Melanie Hernandez traveled to India on our pilot program in 2013. 

As a new mom, Melanie Hernandez was more focused on her infant’s health than her own. So when she noticed the “weird lump” when her daughter was just 6 weeks old, she attributed it to hormones or other pregnancy-related issues – to her body just “trying to figure things out.”

It wasn’t until her daughter was 10 months old that Melanie mentioned the lump to her midwife, who suggested she see a gynecologist. The biopsy was done on her 31st birthday.

“I remember her looking at me, and she said, ‘Do you know what malignant melanoma is?’ and I just looked at her and said, ‘That’s just skin cancer, no big deal.’ I didn’t know anything about it; I was so naïve.”

It wasn’t until the doctor referred her to the physicians at the University of California San Francisco that she realized how serious it was. That was January 2010.

“That was the start of the adventure,” says Melanie, now 36.

The problems compounded: She was uninsured. Then uninsurable. She and her husband spent months getting rid of assets to qualify for medical coverage through the state. Four of the rental properties they owned as a savings plan for their four children had to be let go. They decided to sell their own home to pay medical expenses, but the housing market was bombing. “We just had to let everything go.”

Then she started treatment. Cancer was found in her lymph nodes, so she had to return for more radial surgery. In July 2010, she entered a clinical trial.

Melanie had also owned her own preschool. But after the surgeries and treatment “emotionally, I was done. I was so depressed, and I didn’t realize it. I just knew I felt terrible and had no motivation,” she said. She loved her husband and children but “I had no passion for anything.”

She sold her school in February 2011. “What used to light my life … it just wasn’t there.”

By May 2011, there was no evident disease.

Needing something more

In the midst of the recovery, Melanie attended a rock climbing adventure camp but felt uncomfortable there. She had wanted to “get out and do something” – she had never met anyone in person who had her same diagnosis and was feeling disconnected.

“Everything gets lost; it’s like a house fire, so when it’s all said and done you have to go and rummage thru the rubble and pick out the old pieces of jewelry and whatever you can find that isn’t burned.”

But this camp was about feelings. And that introspection was not what she was searching for.

That’s where she overheard Terri Wingham talking to other people about the first A Fresh Chapter program in India. “I was like, yikes that sounds terrible,” she says, laughing. “I guess I just wasn’t in the right place.”

But later, the two connected on Facebook, where Wingham posted about a deadline to be considered as one of 12 to pilot the very first program in February 2013. And then it seemed right.

“I didn’t have any misgivings … It seemed like something I needed to do.”

But Melanie, who had spent her life in the small town of Willits, pop. 5,500, in northern California’s redwoods area, and met her husband in middle school, the adventure was a little outside this introvert’s comfort zone. She had never even tried Indian food.

Endurance

Through the diagnosis, painful surgeries, and guilt of not being able to focus fully on her baby, there naturally were tears. But largely, Melanie says, “I hadn’t even really cried about my experience much.”

When she volunteered in India and began taking the experience to heart, the tears came. During bus rides to the Taj Mahal and other attractions or at night in her room, she broke down. She was processing.

“It just opens you up. There’s just pieces of you that are just buried so deep. Your everyday environment doesn’t allow you to unearth them. You think that you’re coping just fine and that you’re processing and then you get pulled out of what makes you comfortable.”

Melanie’s volunteer placement also put her in a school, which brought her back to working with children. Melanie tells of a painting a young girl gave her that she still holds dear – precious because those children had so little to give.

The pictures of her in that environment bring clarity to the transformation it had on her. “That deep sense of who I was and what I was passionate about hadn’t surfaced in a long time … It definitely relit the spark.”

The physical, psychological and emotional pain of cancer is not a choice. But going to a foreign land, with a bed you’re not used to sleeping in, food you’re not familiar with and strangers you have to meet and relate to, is a choice. “It’s very empowering.”

New life

Melanie is now the Director at a State Preschool. A position she was reluctant to commit to but found comfort in that familiar discomfort she embraced in India – one of many ways in which she reclaimed pieces of her old self.

She appreciates travel now and would again take the opportunity to go anywhere foreign.

“Now I will take any opportunity I have to do something alone. Especially to travel alone … it’s such a reboot and recharge.”

 

Amber Paluch is a community engagement program officer with the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation, overseeing scholarships and administering grant-making programs. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh with a degree in journalism and began her career in newspapers, first as a reporter at the Wausau Daily Herald, then as an editor there and at Press-Gazette Media in Green Bay. She is involved in several community organizations addressing issues such as childhood obesity, domestic violence, and affordable housing.

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