Terri Wingham is the founder and executive director of A Fresh Chapter Alliance Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to healing the emotional scars of cancer by blending meaningful volunteer travel with programs designed to reframe adversity, foster connections, and promote personal growth and development. A breast cancer diagnosis at age 30 changed Terri forever, transporting her from corporate life to a foreign world of chemotherapy and surgeries. Emotionally and physically d

My mother, Maria Valentina Martins, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in February, 2010. Her life’s journey ended too soon thereafter, on January 21, 2012. As is too often the case, she was not diagnosed with ovarian cancer until Stage III. For months prior to her diagnosis, my mother did not feel well. She complained of constant stomach distress on a daily basis. Just the year before, she had seen her Gastroenterologist and had many diagnostic tests performed. The resul

The Sandy Rollman Ovarian Cancer Foundation (SROCF) humbly began 16 years ago, on a living room floor, with the goal to give women a fighting chance against ovarian cancer. At the heart of the foundation is Sandy Rollman, a remarkable woman who passed away from complications due to ovarian cancer in 2000 at far too young an age. I was Sandy’s oncology nurse, and first came together with her sister, Adriana Way, to fight for Sandy when she couldn’t fight for herself any longer

On April 21, 2010 life seemed “normal”, until I found my mother laying on her living room floor, confused and hallucinating. We called 911 and took her to the emergency room. After four long hours of waiting and wondering, we got a diagnosis…a metastatic brain tumor. Everyone assumed it was a result of her breast cancer returning 8 years later. A few days following the surgery to remove the tumor the pathology came back. It was NOT breast cancer but was in fact ovarian cancer

Our cancer story started on August 20, 2011, after being married just about a year and a half, I was 28, and my wife, Katie, was 25. I got a call from Katie, a nurse at a cardiologist office at the time, while I was at work that she was having pain in her abdomen and the doctor at her office thought it was appendicitis. I wasn’t alarmed. I had heard of appendicitis. It’s something that you go in, have a minor surgery to have it removed since nobody really knows what it do