The Joy of Being Mona

Once given 18 months to live, breast cancer survivor Mona Melms reflects on her journey 18 years later – the good, the bad and the happy lessons inbetween.

By Emily Bradley

Photographed by David Watkins

In her sunlit exercise studio overlooking State Street, Mona Melms begins to dance. As she moves, the sounds of traffic and crowded sidewalks fade from her awareness, leaving Melms focused on her body and the music. She throws punches and kicks, building energy. Fusing movements from various disciplines, she creates an intricate dance, known as Nia, that melds body and spirit. As the final song fades out, she winds down after a heart-pumping workout, her face glowing with the joy that invigorated every step.

For Melms, owner of exercise studio Melt and a longtime fitness instructor, Nia does more than incorporate martial arts, dance and healing into a single routine. It reminds her to be joyful in her own body every day. 

Reaching this point has been a hard-fought victory for Melms, who was diagnosed with breast cancer Feb. 14, 1992—Valentine’s Day. She spent the holiday in the hospital with doctors and nurses, instead of with her husband and two daughters, then 2 and 4. Her doctor told her she’d be lucky if she lived 18 months.

It has been 18 years.

“When they told me my diagnosis and my daughter was 4, I prayed I would make it to take her to kindergarten,” Melms says, blinking back tears. “[In July] I saw her get married. She’s 23 now.”

Now 54, Melms celebrates every day with the same optimism and determination she called on after her terminal diagnosis.

“I love a challenge, and that was the biggest challenge of my life—somehow figuring out how to survive the cancer,” she says.

 

A pea-sized lump in her right breast was all Melms noticed during a self-exam. But after a needle aspiration and a biopsy, she learned the small lump was stage 3 breast cancer that had already spread to her lymph nodes.

“Cancer was a dirty word then,” Melms explains. “The C-word. People could hardly say it.”

Melms was 34 at the time. Even as a nurse on the fast track to becoming a hospital administrator, nothing prepared her to hear such a grim prognosis.

“It was a fear unlike anything I had ever known…knowing it’s not going to be OK,” Melms recalls. But, keeping her husband and daughters in mind, she vowed to fight.

“I think what happened is [the diagnosis] empowered and strengthened me, as weird as that sounds,” Melms says. “[It was an] opportunity not to acquiesce to it…to say ‘I’m strong and I can do this. I don’t know how, but I can do this.’”

Melms collaborated with her medical team to determine her course of treatment. Drawing on both her medical background and her own determination, Melms felt she was able to wield some control over a disease that leaves many feeling powerless.

After a lumpectomy to remove her tumor, Melms sought an alternative to the standard treatment plan and entered into a research study. She was randomly selected to receive the most difficult protocol in the study—four times the standard dosage of chemotherapy—and was warned the treatment might kill her. It nearly did.

“When they told me how devastating the treatment was going to be…I said bring it on,” Melms says. “I wanted as big of a gun as I could get.”

Many patients in her protocol did not live through the study. Melms herself was hospitalized for much of the treatment. She even recalls looking through catalogs, deciding what color and style of dress to wear in her casket, and which of her sisters would take her daughters to school on the day of her funeral.

An eternal optimist, Melms found herself struggling; it occasionally felt like she was fighting her battles alone. Decades younger than most other women with breast cancer, Melms found it difficult to connect with women who truly understood the unique story of a young woman facing breast cancer, and she couldn’t find the words to share her own.

An excitable, energetic person, Melms didn’t know how to admit she was afraid to die.

 

Melms’ healing process soon took her to a new place in life. A nurse trained in modern, Western medicine, Melms began looking elsewhere for answers. She visited anyone who said they could heal her, and soon found herself in basements, chanting and lighting incense as spiritual healers performed what she used to call “mystic voodoo.”

“I thought, well, why not? I’m going to die anyway,” she recalls, chuckling.

One of the many spiritual healers Melms saw was a touch healer who chanted as her hands hovered above Melms’ body, moving over her chakras—the energy centers of the body that many Eastern practices focus on. The healer told Melms she felt a white, healing energy in every region of Melms’ body, except in Melms’ throat, where a black energy dominated.

Only months past her diagnosis, Melms feared the cancer had spread. But the healer explained her vision differently. Melms’ throat appeared that color because she needed to find a voice to speak.

“I thought that was pretty powerful. Until that time, I didn’t even tell my husband how much I was afraid,” Melms says. “That helped me [understand] it’s OK to say you’re fearful…It’s OK to say you don’t want to die.”

In need of a way to voice the fears she had been unable to express aloud, Melms began to write.

In a series of journals Melms kept, her looping script describes the pain of a woman trying to continue life as normal, while facing her own mortality. Knowing these journals may be the only memento her daughters would have of their mother, Melms wrote to them.

She told her daughters that aggressive chemotherapy and radical radiation treatments sapped her body of energy, leaving the former athletic trainer unable to complete even simple tasks.

She apologized to her oldest daughter Mara, writing, “When I should have been proudly watching you perform at your ballet recital, I was instead being admitted for a fever to the hospital.” She explained to her youngest daughter Liza that after surgery, “I was very uncomfortable and sore, and you couldn’t even sit on my lap without me wincing or even crying out in pain…I felt so sad to have you stay away.”

As her debilitating treatment began to take its toll, support from those around her helped Melms continue to fight. Her friends and sisters organized cooking and cleaning schedules, running her household when she couldn’t.

“They put meals on the table because I wasn’t capable,” Melms says. “That is just a really healing thing about how women can take care of each other—no questions asked, no expectations.”

Melms says it was her children and her husband, Tom, however, who really gave her the courage to face each day and the love she needed to heal.

“My 2-year-old at the time, Liza, came to me one day and tucked me up with covers and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy, my love will help you,’” Melms says. “There’s a lot of healing in love.”

 

Melms didn’t hear the word “remission” for years. As part of the study that determined her treatment, she had frequent checkups for five years to monitor her progress. Each time, Melms was told the cancer was still at bay, but no one ever uttered the word remission.

“Nobody ever had those brave words for me,” she says. It took 10 years for Melms to believe she might survive.

“When I hit the 10-year mark, it was like, ‘huh, maybe I’m going to make it,’” Melms recalls. “I breathed a little easier.”

But even now, her cancer isn’t forgotten.

“I still don’t feel as though it’s behind me,” she admits. “That anniversary date of the diagnosis—Valentine’s Day—is a really hard day for me. People that are close to me bring me flowers and know the flowers are not for Valentine’s Day—they’re because this was a hard day.”

For a long time, she struggled to accept how deeply cancer had impacted her life. During her first Nia class three years ago, Melms realized she had not even touched her right breast since her cancer diagnosis. Even though the scars had faded and her body had healed, Melms still felt wounded.

“I think for a long time I denied that [cancer] had any real effect on me, but it does,” she says. “It touches you in such deep ways because you come to face your own mortality.”

Melms realized that in order to get what she wanted out of life, she needed to reflect and use her experience to grow.

“I think [cancer has] just made me more certain about the purpose of life, which is to find happiness and give it to others,” she says.

Just over two years ago, Melms found a way to accomplish her goal by opening Melt, her exercise studio. Even without a single client and no idea how she would pay her first month’s rent, Melms was ready to realize her dream of helping other women find comfort in their bodies, and find joy out of life.

“I did it totally on my belief that I could make it happen,” Melms recalls, laughing. “And at the end of the first month I paid rent.”

 

Eighteen years after receiving her death sentence, Melms is more energized and positive than ever.

“I want people to be joyful. That’s my message about healing,” Melms says, speaking faster with excitement. “I just love the vibe of being alive.”

Although she worries that her daughters may one day face a similar battle with breast cancer, she knows from experience that dark thoughts will pass in time.

“I’m not somebody who gets down too much,” Melms explains. But on rare occasions when she does, Melms abides by the same advice she gives to others dealing with cancer: “Be OK about having really dark moments and just know that they’re there, but the sun’s going to shine…I promise you, it will.”

Melms’ positive outlook spills over into every aspect of her life. Even as she reads through her cancer journals for the first time since writing them, she recognizes how her experience has made her more determined to succeed.

“I have not gone back to that place very often at all,” she admits. “I try so hard to be strong all the time and help everybody else stay up, and I was vulnerable [when I wrote the journals].”

Looking back, she can say there’s no shame in being a woman who has defeated cancer and used her exuberance to help others. Melms says her harrowing journey showed her she needed to look ahead and pursue her dreams.

“Life is full of so much opportunity. That’s what cancer teaches you,” she says.

Today, Melms continues to remind herself of each lesson she has learned throughout the years. “The older I get the more I learn about this journey I’ve been on, and it will stay with me forever.”