Hello! My name is Crystal (aka C-Star), I am 39 years old, and I have led a life devoted to creating healing and loving connection with family, planet, community, and beyond. I am also a mother of a beautiful and curious 9-year-old girl named Yemaya. My work in the world is to create healing spaces, events, classes, and one-on-one sessions where we can find safety, dive deeper, and rise higher into the truth of who we are.

In the spring of 2025, I was diagnosed with triple positive metastatic breast cancer. The cancer spread from my breast to my bone which made it stage 4, aka metastatic, and was also categorized as having a highly aggressive nature giving it both speed of growth and proclivity to spread. This was all an incredible shock for me to say the least, especially because generally I consider myself a pretty healthy person.

Given the background I have in holistic medicine, I have opted for an approach that involves conventional, integrative, and holistic therapies. I have been using a number of different medications, treatments, infusions, and healing modalities to support my healing process. Starting in April of 2025, I underwent about 6 months of chemotherapy infusions. This is when I started this GoFundMe to raise some funds to support paying for the many therapies and treatments not covered under my insurance. I am self-employed and have had a pretty dramatic reduction in my ability to cover our month-to-month expenses since receiving this diagnosis last year.

The funds originally raised via this GoFundMe have helped me to cover bills, pay for treatments, and to also pay for my functional medicine visits over the past 6 months. I have been so grateful to feel a little more financial ease as I navigate this healing journey. I am finding myself in another round of needing to ask for some support.

In January of this year I got some more challenging news. I had been between some medications because of a surgical procedure I had in November of 2025. I started new treatment therapies in December of 2025, but by January of 2026 it was apparent that something was off. It turns out that the cancer had mutated and the medications from the conventional doctors were no longer effective for me. The cancer had spread to my brain and my liver and was causing neurological symptoms that were making it hard for me to walk, think, see, and balance.

Needless to say, this has been an intense and scary time as of late. I was in a month long deep dive figuring out how to best treat and address this new development. I also dove deeper into trust and faith. I have been deepening my commitment to my health and have faced a lot of fear and simultaneously embraced a profound sense of peace and hope.

Thankfully there have been some really positive developments out of this perceived setback in my healing. I underwent pin-point radiation therapy for 5 lesions in my brain and my neurological symptoms are correcting themselves. This type of treatment has been shown to be both very effective along with producing minimal side effects. I have also started a new, highly specific, and highly effective infusion medication from the conventional doctors that will address the cancer cells everywhere in my body, even over the blood-brain barrier. In addition, I am continuing the holistic therapies I have been doing which were also proving to be very effective and synergistic with the conventional treatments.

Just when I thought I was going to start scaling down the mountain after the last year of this trek with cancer, I was instead faced with another steep and rocky summit to scale. Fingers are crossed that indeed now I am on the other side and heading to a phase of more ease and on the trajectory to full remission! And the reality is that I am going to be in a rehabilitation state for the next couple of months, recalibrating and healing. I am starting to build back up my business but it has been slow going. I am anticipating that I am going to continue to have a considerable gap between what I am earning and what my expenses are through this summer, so I am raising back up my GoFundMe goal and I hope to raise another $10,000+ dollars to help during this next half of a year of transition.

If you are able to spare some funds to support our lives and my healing, we are deeply appreciative, and any amount of contribution is welcome! And if financial support is not something you are able to give, please know that any well wishes, inspiring messages, in-kind donations, prayers, or other support are also well received. Specifically I would love to ask for your prayers (in any lineage,, form, or denomination), spoken, shared, or silent, as they have felt the so deeply supportive for me in this time. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you would like to connect more or offer any specific support. Thank you for your time and your care. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Thank you for being in our lives. May you be deeply blessed and supported with love in your heart every day!