Vol.1
In the Space Between
A story of healing, play, and what’s still possible.
Before 2020, I thought I was living the American dream.
We were a young family on the road, traveling full-time in an RV. My husband worked remotely, I homeschooled the kids, and every few weeks we’d roll into a new town—visiting friends, exploring parks, chasing sunlight. It was exciting and somehow balanced. I loved that life.
For years I’d dealt with what doctors called IBS. I kept changing my diet, trying to understand why I felt sick so often. By late 2019 I was exhausted, anxious, and uncomfortable every day. I kept saying, I just don’t feel great. The guilt of always being unwell sat heavy.
By March 2020, as the world started whispering about a strange new illness, we began heading north from our winter base in Florida. A few weeks later, in Tennessee, I found myself in a walk-in clinic, doubled over, sure it was appendicitis or gallstones.
Instead, the ultrasound showed thirteen lesions on my liver.
Within a week we were back in Kentucky. The cancer center became my new road stop. Stage 4 colon cancer with liver metastases. My hope would rest in a hepatic-artery-pump study. Eleven hours of surgery removed part of my colon, gallbladder, uterus—and placed the pump.
It was spring 2020. The world had locked down.
All cancer patients walk the path alone inside, but due to this unknown threat we walked it physically alone too. Nurses served as family and caregivers in the clinics and hospitals.
The next eight months were chemo, isolation, and survival. Friends left groceries on my porch. My kids waved to me from the yard while I recovered. Everyone was scared; everyone was trying to keep each other alive.
Since then, it’s been five years of scans, treatments, radiation, pump removal, and a secondary liver-related disease. A cycle of rebuilding, breaking down, and starting again.
And just when I thought I had endured all I could, came another kind of storm—the unraveling of my marriage. After twenty years together, I found myself rebuilding not just my body but my entire life.
It’s now fall 2025.
I’m still here. Scarred, yes, but alive. It took therapy, friends, and the kind of honesty that burns through denial. I’ve learned that being taken to the core of yourself isn’t poetic—it’s brutal—but when the wounds heal, they leave behind a strange strength.
“Play can be resistance and oxygen to our hardships.”
This is where Play It Out Studio begins:
in the space between what broke and what’s still possible.
Over these last five years I’ve kept digging—sometimes through tears—for play and creativity. With friends I’ve hiked mountains in prom dresses, worn matching wigs to the Color Museum in Chicago with our daughters, gone rafting in a formal gown, and made endless craft projects badly, just for fun.
Each silly, beautiful moment reminded me that joy doesn’t wait for life to be perfect—it grows wherever we give it a little room.
Play It Out Studio 