Ep 24: Badass Cancer Warrior – Alia Nicole Hajaj
What if the doctors told you that you had 3 months to live?
What if they told you that you’d never walk again?
Would you take it as your destiny? Or would you fight like a Badass Cancer Warrior?
This week Alia tells her story of being a Badass Cancer Warrior…
At the age of 26, Alia Nicole Hajaj has endured a lot in her short life thusfar. From beating a nasty heroin addiction, to losing 150 lbs through diet and exercise, Alia is now onto the biggest challenge she has ever faced: cancer.
This year on January 8th, she was diagnosed with stage 4 b intrauterine cancer; it had already metastasized to her liver, lymph nodes, lungs, brain, uterus, cervix, spine, kidney, and hip. She was told she had three months to live, six if she was lucky. Alia began the most uphill battle of her life; she started chemotherapy and taking cbd oils, she also began using essential oils and reiki treatments. Within the first 2 and a half months after the diagnosis, she had completely lost her ability to walk, lift her arms up, and urinate on her own (she had to be cathed every time).
Alia almost gave up at this point and began looking into assisted suicide, until one day when she was taken to get an MRI during one of her many hospital stays. While inside the scan, she thought to herself, “people live in wheelchairs their entire lives and get cathed, life’s not so bad, if you’re gonna have to be here might as well be happy for whatever time you have left.” Her attitude changed and she genuinely began to believe that she was going to get better, and she actually began to get better. She began to walk again with her walker, then peed on her own again, and was even dancing under the moonlight at one of her favorite festivals, Forgotten City, at the end of May!
She even began working again as a bartender at Red Robin. After months of miraculous recovery, Alia eventually got a new scan done, and when the results came back, she was baffled: the cancer had disappeared out of her brain! It got significantly smaller in the hip, neck, lungs, and uterus, and everywhere else stayed stable! This was the first good news she had gotten since her diagnosis. She was on top of the world and on her way to Burning Man. She recently had a tiny back slide and the cancer metastasized a tiny bit more into her left hip again, so she has begun having trouble walking again and had to take time off work. She is not broken though; she knows It will get better, just like it did earlier in the year, so she has delved back into finishing her book “I Stole a Donut From a Diabetic Named Honest Pete,” a book of half fiction and half non, regarding Alia’s wild life.
And, most importantly, she has re-started writing her motivational speech; she has wanted to be a motivational speaker since she was young, and looks at her cancer at an obstacle she had to go through, beat, and then go onto helping other people who are fighting any of the good fights to know that they can win. You can help Alia with her bills with her gofundme.
