Look Good...Feel Better

Six years ago tomorrow, I walked with my best friend Teresa at Relay for Life. For her. And her cancer was so new she'd only had one chemo treatment and hadn't even lost her hair yet, that would begin to fall out just a couple weeks later. And my daughter, Teresa's goddaughter, hadn't even turned one-year old yet.

My daughter was too young to know how hard it was for Teresa to not only fight the cancer but to go thru all the surface changes. When she went to pick out a wig, she was terrified. She took about 8 of us along to help her...we made a party out of it. But she needed us there to help her pick out a wig, but more than that, to remind her that she was still so beautiful even without her hair.

Teresa, as a nurse, was the type of person who met her cancer full-on with research in hand. Once she got thru that initial denial, she met everyone armed with an arsenal of information. But, that was just about her disease, not about her...as a woman. Mom Central told me about this website and I wish I'd known about Look Good...Feel Better to give her information about all those other insecurities that come from having cancer.

What is it, exactly?

Look Good…Feel Better is a free, non-medical, brand-neutral, national public service program created to help individuals with cancer look good, improve their self-esteem, and manage their treatment and recovery with greater confidence.

But, wow, what a great source of information for everything from wig selection to how to put your eyebrows back on when you lose them to chemo. Teresa always seemed even more frustrated with the lack of eyebrows and eyelashes than she even did about the hair on her head!

Look Good...Feel Better is celebrating its 20th anniversary by looking for people to share their survivor stories as part of the "Women of Hope is Beautiful" campaign. There's an extensive timeline of what has been going on the past 20 years with LGFB if you, too, are learning about it for the first time.

Take a look though, there's a blog and a place for women to submit stories and photos. Cancer is never easy, but finding a support network to get some answers and some help with even something that seems silly like how to apply eyeshadow when the eyes seem to fade away with the ravages of the disease and the challenges of treatment.

Cancer is hard, but finding support should be easy.