RESILIENCE

RESILIENT MAGAZINE

RESILIENCE IN LIFE AND LEADERSHIP

Christine Handy is a mother of two, a breast cancer survivor, an international speaker, and an accomplished model. She is also a student at Harvard, a mentor board member of two nonprofits and a nationally recognized humanitarian. Christine is a popular social media influencer and Fox News breast cancer expert. Christine has seen it all and has overcome all odds. Her motto is, that there's always a purpose and pain. Christine is also a best-selling author of the book Walk Beside Me A Story of Hope, Faith, Friendship, Hardship, and Taking a Closer Look at What Truly Matters.

Kim: Christine, please tell us a little bit more about who you are.

I'm a mother, which is my most important job. I'm an avid tennis player, which will be shocking to you after we talk about my story. I live in Miami, Florida, because I'm a beach girl, not a mountain girl. And I'm from Saint Louis, Missouri, so I'm forever a Midwesterner. And I'm from Kansas. So we've got that in common. But you got the beaches, and I'm from the mountains. Can you tell how white I am? So I blend in winter for you.

Kim: Share with us what you do.

I get to wake up every single day and serve in some capacity, whether it's with my book. Whether it's with my speaking career, whether it's modelling with a concave chest in New York Fashion Week or the year in Miami Fashion Week, if it's mentoring cancer patients or mentoring prisoners, or working with brands on social media, giving people hope and sharing my

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purpose and even with my children. So pretty much from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed, I'm doing what I'm serving, I'm inspiring, I'm giving people hope in some regard. So I do a lot of different things. But altruism is what I do.

Kim: So what does mentorship look like for you? What is that around mentorship that is part of your purpose?

I started to speak in the prisons in the state of Florida about four years ago. When I started to speak in the prison system, I had no idea that would be kind of a passion of mine. I was chosen as a motivational speaker and I wasn't chosen to be in a women's prison. I was chosen to be in men's prisons, which, in my opinion, is rare, I've historically only spoken in women's organizations. And so that was kind of a surprise for me. But I'm always up for a challenge. So I said, no problem. And when I started to speak in these prisons, there was an app called JPEG, and you can e-mail the prisoners back and forth. So what they asked me when I'm at that prison, if I will e-mail them, then I always say yes. So I have a lot of people in the prison system who e-mail me and expect a response. So I do that. I mentor a lot of prisoners, and that's how I do it. But I also have had the opportunity to mentor some of them since they've gotten out of jail. A couple specifically one reached out to me about four years ago, and he reached out to me on Facebook, I think originally, and he said, Would you mind meeting me? I have an idea. And I thought, Yeah, no problem. A couple of my friends said You're crazy. You should not go meet somebody that just got out of prison for 30 years for murder. And I said You know what? Everybody has a story. Everybody has a story of forgiveness. And if we can't forgive people that come out of jail, then that's our problem. And that's my heart. I'm not going to live like that. So I went to meet this gentleman, and we showed up in a red suit, like a red jacket, a red shirt, red pants, red shoes and a briefcase. And he said, I think we should start an organization in Palm Beach County, which is a big county in Florida. And we should try to change the rate of recidivism, which, by the way, was 97% four years ago. If you don't know what that word means, it's the rate of people going back to jail. In the United States, it is the highest globally. Unacceptable. So I said to him, you know what? Let's talk through this. And it took several months. But three years later, four years later, we have a full board of people. We have raised a ton of money. We have great resources for people who come out of the prison system in Palm Beach County. And we're helping to teach them how to fish. Like we're not giving them handouts. We're trying to teach them. And so I said yes to this prisoner. So that's kind of what I mean by mentoring. There are a lot of women who have reached out to me on social with breast cancer. I mentor them. So in any regard that I can, I'm helping other people, giving them hope, because I know how much despair costs you. I know what feeling like paralysis emotionally feels like. I've been in that position. I don't want people to be in that position. I want somebody like me. If it has to be me, it'll be me. I want somebody to give somebody help.

The other board that I sit on is called E Beauty. E Beauty is a wig exchange program. It's for women going through treatment who cannot afford a wig. I went through chemotherapy. I did not have any hair. I was privileged enough to be able to afford many wigs and my children needed to see their mother with a wig. They wanted me to look as much as I could like myself. But so many women cannot afford a wig and they're expensive. So we have partnered with L'Oreal and the Paul Mitchell salons. L'Oreal gives us grant money and the Paul Mitchell salons wash and style our wigs. And then we ship them out our biggest cost per e beauty of shipping these wigs out. But it's a free resource for women. And so I'm always constantly trying to promote it because people don't know about it. So if you go to E Beauty dot com and you're going through treatment and you need a wig, you can pick out the colour, and the style and we will ship it to you.

Kim: So you talk about being disabled, do you mind sharing with us what the disability is?

So let's go back to the self-esteem that was nonexistent before my cancer diagnosis. I had a torn ligament in my right wrist. And I went to see three great doctors. I picked one of them to stand for grad, you know, I picked the pedigree guy and he performed the surgery. And because my self-esteem was low, I'm not blaming this completely on myself,

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but he missed after the cast came off, my I had some all these other issues, and he misdiagnosed what that was. He sent me to a physical therapist far away from his office. He bullied me emotionally and told me that all the pain and swelling was in my head. And I believed him. And after seven or eight months of him bullying me and calling me a hysterical housewife, although I'd never shed a tear in his office, I finally got up enough courage because I didn't have very good self-esteem and saw a second

opinion at that point. My arm that almost lost all the cartilage in my right arm and right wrist was destroyed. There was not any left. The bones in my right wrist were broken. There was not one bone that was not broken. So I had to go into immediate surgery and they dug out as much infection as they could. And then they put a pick line in my arm. Then I flew up to New York City to a hospital called SS, which is a hospital for special surgery. And a very kind doctor took my case. Oftentimes, doctors won't take other doctors' botched cases. That's a liability. Yep. And he took out my wrist and he fuzed it with cadaver bones, a cadaver Achilles tendon and bone graft and stitched it up. And I came back six weeks later for my six-week post-arm fusion appointment I was in the shower trying to wash my body with a bar of soap, and I felt a lump in my breast. Five days later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and so because my arm is fuzed, I have no wrist. I'm in constant pain and I couldn't even start chemotherapy because of the bone grafts. And the cadaver bones would have dissolved if I'd started chemotherapy. So I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and then couldn't even start treatment for a month because of what the doctor did to my arm. Talk about learning how to forgive. That was a real struggle for me, but I, I don't give that man any weight in my life ever. So I'm disabled in my way.

I THINK THAT THE BIGGEST STRUGGLE WOMEN HAVE IS THAT IMPOSTER SYNDROME. I SEE THAT REPEATEDLY. CREDIBILITY, CONFIDENCE AND RELEVANCY ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES THEY FACE AND IT'S REALLY EASY TO GET SIDELINED BY THOSE THAT YOU'VE GROWN UP WITH OR HAVE BEEN AROUND IN YOUR LIFE.

Kim: You're a student at Harvard, so not that you have enough going on. What are you studying?

So after I completed chemotherapy, I had terrible chemo brain. Chemo brain exists it's your brain is foggy. Your short-term memory socks and your cognitive skills are impaired. So I would drive down the road to go pick up my children. And if there was not somebody driving, if I turned and there wasn't somebody on the road, I would forget which side to turn on. That's how much chemo has affected my life. And I knew at that point I had rebuilt my selfesteem. I knew at that point I could not depend on other people to fix my brain. I had to fix it. And so it was all about it, kind of empowerment. I can do this. And so I said to myself because I was not meditating on the outcome anymore, I was meditating on the courage that I could show myself every day. And so I said to myself, You know what? You should apply to Harvard. You should go back to school. You should get your master's degree in writing and literature and try to fix your chemo brain. So I said to myself, Okay. So I applied to Harvard, and I also said to myself, if I don't if they don't accept me, who cares? You can never win if you don't try it. And so but that, like so much of my life, was so insecure and my self-esteem was so low that I wouldn't even put