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Tina Overbury: Terry Fox ran for us and now we run for him

When she was a child, Tina Overbury thought she had a personal connection with Terry Fox. On September 20, she'll be running with him, and all of her fellow cancer patients, in mind
Tina Overbury
“It’s important to recognize that no one is exempt. Everyone lives in a body,” says Tina Overbury, whose tonsil cancer was “the integrating catalyst of my life.”

A year before she was diagnosed with tonsil cancer, Tina Overbury was standing in the kitchen of her house on Bowen Island, overwhelmed by the sense that something was broken. She didn’t know what it was — and didn’t feel that was physical — but the feeling was strong enough to make her slap her hands down on her kitchen island and say, “This has to stop.”

An avid exerciser, she was in one sense in tune with her body. But, at 43, she had always listened to its needs and responses with a certain detachment. 

“All of my life I have lived outside my body,” she says. What she was about to realize is “I am a soul that lives in the body and they are connected.”

With her friend Miel’s help, “I started little rituals to come into my body.” It could be as simple as slowing down to put on a pair of socks when she felt cold, slowing down to eat when she was hungry. Slowing down. Listening. Responding.

At first she thought the white blotch at the back of her throat was caused by tonsillitis or strep throat. It didn’t hurt so she didn’t really worry about it until it ruptured. Her doctor took a biopsy.

An Arbonne consultant, Overbury was at a conference about the non-toxic skincare products when her doctor called her with the results. “I knew it must be serious because he was about to get on a plane.”

He told her that she had Stage 3 tonsil cancer and that it had a very high — 86 per cent — cure rate because it was easy to treat.

Easy, he warned, but gruelling.

He was right. For seven weeks from this past April to July, Overbury underwent radiation for the one tumour on her tonsil and three tumours in her lymph nodes. 

“It was nasty, nasty, nasty,” she says of repercussions of radiation in such a highly sensitive part of the body. She’s lost 30 pounds —and, Holy Hannah as she keeps marvelling, she’s even lost her bum.

Friends on Facebook have been following her journey, amazed by her mixture of brutal honesty, refreshing joy and unfiltered working-things-through approach to it all.

“I’ve always been asking for more. I ask for depth, I ask for challenge, I ask for other-worldness,” she says. She likes to go to edge of the void and touch it. “Every time I slam up to a boundary, it freaks me out. I look for the freedom.”

One of the books that’s influenced her is The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron, an ordained Buddhist nun. One piece of Chodron’s advice is “to remain wholeheartedly awake to everything that occurs and to use the abundant material of daily life as [our] primary teacher and guide.”

On Facebook — and soon on her new blog, Tina OLife — Overbury has been sorting out some of the big questions we all face. “What if you can’t escape your life — an answer, an insight? What if we choose never to figure it out and to live in the fullness, or all-ness, of who we are?”

In her life she has had many of those “Wow, in a second everything has changed” moments but the cancer diagnosis, and the treatment that followed, have been “the integrating catalyst of my life so far.”

There can be startling discoveries when mind, body and emotions are no longer kept at distance from one another and can start sharing secrets.

Today there are a lot of things Overbury won’t do any more, including three esses — “I do no Stress, I eat no Sugar and I take no Shit.”

When Tina was eight, her adopted mother died of cancer. Her father couldn’t cope with his own grief, as well as take care of others, so Tina and her brother were sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Port Coquitlam for a few months.

It was around the time that Terry Fox was running across Canada in his Marathon of Hope.

The schoolyard rumour mill had it that Terry had been bitten by a bear, and that’s how he lost his leg. And because he was from the area, Tina felt that they actually knew one another. While other adults tended to keep their cancer story to themselves, “Terry was the first one that let us in.”

This Sunday (September 20), she might not be able to make it back to Bowen Island in time to participate in the island’s Terry Fox Run but run she will, with him, and all the other people with cancer, in mind.

The money raised is vital. When she was undergoing radiation, she was in one of nine treatment rooms at the hospital. Each treatment room saw 30 people a day. That’s 270 people a day, just in Vancouver.

As a nonsmoker who exercised regularly, her cancer diagnosis might seem totally unexpected but why should it be? Are the other people — the “one in one thousand”  or “one in 10 thousand” — expecting to be told that they have cancer? 

So, no, you can’t escape your life if it is to include a cancer diagnosis. “It’s important to recognize that no one is exempt. Everyone lives in a body.”

 

There is no fee to enter Bowen Island’s Terry Fox on Sunday, September 20. 11am registration at the Little Red Church; 11:30 start.

There are two options: 4K and 8K. Bicycles are okay but no wheelchairs or rollerblades. Dogs on leash welcome. Donations can also be received at this time.

Meanwhile, from November 6 to 8, Overbury is co-leading a workshop at Xenia with Dr. Carolyn Nesbitt called Live Your Best Story. Details at LiveYourBestStory.com.