There's this guy. His name is Matthew Zachary. He's a cancer survivor, a motivational speaker, a concert pianist, and the founder of a resource portal for young adults surviving cancer.Steps for Living, Inc. -- also known as I'm too young for this -- was created by Zachary because he wants us all to know there are awesome cancer support services out there for adolescents and young adults. He means really awesome opportunities -- like spa retreats, online forums and blogs, social networking, camping excursions, fertility education, peer counseling, financial scholarships, and more.
You may be too young for cancer, but you are not alone, says Zachary whose mantra is Get Busy Living. And this is exactly what he is doing, despite challenges and setbacks in his own cancer recovery.
Think about this, an e-mail written by Zachary for those near and dear to his heart:
I am writing to share that I have suddenly gone deaf in my left ear. The condition is called Sudden Sensory Neural Hearing Loss.
After consulting with the country's best hearing experts as well as my oncologist, it has been determined that this is unequivocally a latent, long-term side effect of my post-operative cancer treatments from eleven years ago. Evidently, the excessive radiation dosages to the left hemisphere of my brain have caused irreparable neurological damage to my cochlea, which has ceased functioning.
There may be options (cochlear implants) but I will not know more for several weeks. As you can imagine, this is a devastating blow to my personal life and music career, especially since I remember fighting so hard to regain dexterity and muscle control in my left hand when it ceased functioning prior to my initial diagnosis in 1995.
That said, it has only reinvigorated me to stay the course and continue to advocate on behalf of the more than 500,000 young adults living with, through and beyond cancer each and every year. Now more than ever, I stress the importance of recognizing that remission is not a cure and that public awareness and adequate funding for adolescent and young adult cancer survivorship programming is tantamount to that of cancer research.
This is what it means to be a cancer survivor.
To read more about Zachary's powerful journey, click here for an unbelievably moving essay -- titled The Cost Of Living: No Cure For Cancer -- written by this unbelievably grounded guy.
Winners lose, - heroes cry
Steps For Living and Art of Survivorship 
