Diana Martinez’s cancer diagnosis came at a time when she was already in the midst of sadness and turmoil: She had been laid off from work a few months earlier, and she had suffered a devastating loss when her younger sister died.

 “It was like one thing right after another, and it was right before Christmas when I was diagnosed,” Diana said.

It was Dec. 22, 2012. “It’s so scary,” Diana said. “The doctor says, ‘You have cancer,’ and it just sounded like white noise. I couldn’t really understand anything after that.”

And then she learned it was anal cancer, a cancer that is normally diagnosed in older patients and doesn’t get the kind of publicity or support that some other cancers do.

“It’s not like a common cancer, and it was embarrassing to me to get that diagnosis,” said Diana, 52, of Rialto, California. “And the first thing the doctor said was that this is the same cancer that Farrah Fawcett had, and I thought, ‘Well, gee, didn’t she die? I thought she passed away.’ So that was my first thought about it, and it was very scary to me.”

Diana went through a round of chemotherapy followed by radiation treatment, which concluded in February 2013. Little did she know that a year later she would be scrambling to get ready for a volunteer trip halfway around the world.

It Began In A Los Angeles Garden

Diana first learned of A Fresh Chapter through a local TV news story in which founder Terri Wingham appeared, prompting Diana to visit the organization’s website, where she discovered a two-day volunteer experience at a community garden in Los Angeles.

 “I thought you know what, I’m going to do this, and I’m going totally take myself out of my comfort zone,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like this, I’ve never even thought to do anything like that. It was really life changing. It was really amazing.”

The connections Diana made with the other participants during the two days of the garden program impacted her the most. “The whole garden experience was great, having your hands in the dirt, and talking to people that you had an experience in common with – it was really bonding. I didn’t want to go to a support group, I didn’t want to be like, ‘Hi, my name is Diana and I have cancer.’ That’s not the experience I was looking for.”

As a part of the weekend, which was in November 2013, the volunteers also visited a temple with a meditation garden, and conducted an exercise to help free them of something that had troubled them. Diana had been carrying the weight of the cancer experience and all that came with it – the unfair sense of shame, the sense of drifting now that it was over, the loss of closeness with loved ones who now thought she was fine. But Diana also harbored anger and resentment toward a family member who she had expected would be there through her treatment but wasn’t.

“I came to terms with my feelings and how I felt about that through that two-day experience, because in talking to the other people I realized there were other people there that had the same experience,” Diana said.

And Turned Into A Trip To India

Then two of the garden weekend participants began talking about their volunteer trip to India with A Fresh Chapter earlier that year.

“I never had thought to go to India,” Diana said. “And just to hear them talk about it – it was amazing, and I have to say it really ignited a spark in me.”

When one of the volunteers going on the next trip had to give up her spot due to health reasons, she selflessly offered her spot to Diana. That was January 2014, and the trip was leaving in February.

“That didn’t even give me a minute to think about it,” Diana said. “But then, don’t the best things happen that way?”

She scrambled to get her passport, the visa and everything else she needed to go on this dream trip she had fallen in love with in an L.A. garden. Once in while, the enormity of what she was about to do overwhelmed her.

“When I sat and thought about it, it terrified me – I’d never traveled by myself, and to go that far alone just really scared me,” Diana said. “But I thought, ‘You know what? I can do this. If I can beat cancer, I can do this.”

While in India, Diana volunteered at a school in the slums of Delhi. Diana found more of the camaraderie with other survivors that she had enjoyed in the garden in L.A., as well as a new spark to continue volunteering in her own community – and something more.

“I was looking for something to be grateful about, and I came back with that, I was grateful for the experience, grateful for the people that I met, grateful for the kids,” Diana says. “I have pictures that are going to last me a lifetime. I just wish more people knew about this and understood how great it is.”

Nikki Kallio is a writer and cancer survivor. She has worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Maine and California in a number of roles, including as a health reporter and opinion writer, during which time she traveled to the Mideast and Central Asia as a part of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW). She’s a graduate of the Goddard College MFA creative writing program, and her fiction has appeared in several literary publications. She currently writes for a business magazine in Wisconsin, teaches fiction writing classes, and is completing edits on her first novel.