What would you do if your whole world was shattered in an instant, one minute your hopes and dreams unfolding brightly before you and the next finding yourself thrust into the fight for your life as you race against the clock, just hoping to survive?
At thirty-one, Alyssa Phillips had it all–a successful career, a handsome, adoring husband and plans to start a family underway—but her dream life came crashing down in the blink of an eye when she was told she was in the latest stages of one of the rarest and most aggressive types of cancer known and given a less than five percent chance of survival. She’d just run her best time in a half-marathon and never felt better. As this long time runner and Physician Assistant struggles to understand how she could suddenly be on the other side of the medical equation, the wrong side, she must learn to run an entirely new kind of race…the one for her life. Alyssa now shares her compelling and courageous story in her upcoming memoir.
It’s a journey that takes her deep within to the far corners of herself and to the very edge of life where she is forced to make a pivotal choice when a voice from within calls her to do the unthinkable…to jump out and to trust. Alyssa finds herself suddenly launched on a journey where she must confront her own mortality and choose faith over fear in order to survive. As she allows the pieces of her old life to fall away and endures grueling medical treatments—including an emergency hysterectomy, multiple rounds of high dose chemotherapy and two consecutive bone marrow transplants—a surprising, yet stunning, spiritual transformation occurs.
Blazing a new trail of her own, on faith and faith alone, Alyssa must summon courage she didn’t know she had and go to the place where all true healing begins…within. It’s a gripping adventure filled with heartbreaking grit, witty humor and inspiring bravery as she surrenders to a larger power and discovers what the words “faith” and “hope” really mean. Alyssa boldly searches herself and the “other” side of medicine, sifting through her past and exploring both ancient and cutting-edge healing disciplines as she desperately searches for a way to transform her impossible circumstances into a modern-day miracle. Alyssa ultimately arrives at the answers she seeks as she triumphs over tragedy, and carefully puts the fragments of her life, her new life, back together again—one carefully chosen piece at a time and begins again.
It’s a story as unique as it is universal and is at once the exceptional story of one woman’s tenacious courage in the face of overwhelming odds and a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.
You will find your story within hers and never be the same.
Alyssa also has plans to write a second book sharing the specific, hard-earned tips, tools and resources she used to turn her less than 1% chance of survival into the life of her dreams, a life of perfect health and overflowing happiness. Combining her medical background as a Physician Assistant, her degree in nutrition and her own walk through both the traditional and non-traditional sides of medicine in her fight for survival, Alyssa gives us the “recipe” she used to prevail. These principles can be used by anyone, not just to survive life’s challenges, physical or otherwise, but to thrive in spite of them!
