If you know my name through your friend or family member, you know much of my story by now; If you don't yet know my name, I'm honored to have your 'eyes and ears' for the first time.

Disclaimer: This statement is more intimate--and more difficult to write--than I've dictated even in entire relationships, marriages or very long friendships; I.e., this is tough. But it's best I put pencil to paper on my own behalf, even if the GoFundMe community might deem it uncouth (I care not!).

My legal name is Sophia Aley. My trade name--given to me by two, completely different electrical crews of guys in 2023--is Sunshine. My birth name was Amanda Sophia Aley (for my Virginia childhood schoolmates and early Iowa years' friends and teachers). I am 42 years young. I am legally blind in my left eye.

I was already small before breast cancer.

Nine mere days after I bought a dilapidated, only-a-mother-could-love, EARLY 1900s house on March 31st, 2025, I was diagnosed with DCIS Grade III (of III) breast cancer. It was not a fully livable house and was bought needing extensive demo/reno which indeed began mere minutes after closing. Mine was its only offer during the months of its listing--that kind of house... I had my plan of action. And as it goes for everyone, cancer had no place-marker in my notes or schematics.

I reside therein with my rescue cat and freshly set flower gardens and seventeen shrubs (by yours truly), here in the American Upper Midwest.

I am a classical musician, published poet, painter, handymanlady, home-rehabber, personal gardener, and a massive Iowa Hawkeyes and Denver Broncos fan. I am a college grad (IL Augustana College, '06) who nearly finished a second, equally fiscally-unwise major in addition to Music Performance on Horn.

(That's right, folks! Your Honor Roll Student could choose not one, but TWO unwise majors! Don't let 'em do it!!)

I'm a lover of words with one, small book to my name (Under Wraps) you can find on Blurb, with two more in progress. A title recently came into my head which informs me of the impending birth and nature of Book #4. (I often receive titles before poems/books.)

I am deeply spiritual and reverent toward the Divinity I do see and feel in Nature--particularly in my extra-cherished locales such as the pure, expansive and serene Boundary Waters. The preciously old, blue-green mountains of southwestern Virginia where I grew up before the Iowa years ('96-). The ever undulating, eastern Iowa prairie. And in the mammoth, red and violet wilds of eastern Utah. I'm a pet mother exclusively of rescued animals. I ache for a dog again once all my dust settles. Adopt don't shop. Adoption is my first call-to-action in this essay. Grab a snack, get comfy--there's more!

At my core (my Dasein) is an unabashed, oft regrettable and 'typical Taurus': Quickfire-tempered. Sharp-tongued. Protective. Stubborn, dogged, and even more stubborn. Argumentative, particularly when feeling stubborn. Highly creative, intuitive, empathic or energy-sensitive, detail-obsessed, highly neurotic, fragile-hearted. I am a fierce lover, a fierce fighter, a fierce free-faller: I can shine mega-bright then acquiescently plunge into Darkness that has the likeness, weight and hopelessly black infinity of the Mariana Trench.

I used to be a world-traveler, and I lived in my favorite Earthen city, Vienna (Austria) during college. I used to be a very strong singer. I used to play and teach horn before my sudden onset lip tremor and bizarrely brand-new stage fright forced early, musical retirement in 2020. I used to live in many cool, US places and travel to yet cooler ones with my second husband. I used to be an athlete. I used to have a dependably uncrushable will. I used to have those dreams. I used to regard my formerly golden horizon with powerful confidence and big-plans fervor.

After twenty-one years with at least one finger or hand somehow in the skilled trades, I full-time joined and committed to some serious happiness as a union, electrical apprentice in 2023. And after twenty-one years of simultaneously wasting away and losing my shine in White Collar B.S. day jobs, I finally had a hopeful+healthy life for the first time, albeit late in my work life.

Then came two crushed arms in a very freak, off-the-clock accident in October 2023, about six weeks after earning my five-year apprenticeship through the local IBEW chapter.

Then-then came breast cancer in April of 2025, designated as "spontaneous": I.e., zero family history, zero genetic markers or mutated genes; zero everything and in otherwise perfect physical health (save for my busted arms and one eye down).

In my various, current therapies, I'm reworking (toward ultimately ousting) decades of 'shame' association: Guilt owing to professional "failure-after-failure-after-failure" after having such a promising academic and musical start; Guilt of seventeen years of a killer addiction (insert every eating disorder you know of here--and I was an Olympic Gold Medalist at each one); Guilt for not completing a Doctorate in Orchestral Conducting because I couldn't afford grad school; Guilt for filing bankruptcy at 23 years old after five years of college; Guilt of two divorces and a plethora of failed career-starts. Nothing ever worked long-term: I never found sustained success in the 9-to-5, undertrained and overworked system of American commerce--or in relationships: Every conscientious, earnest attempt at either ended in some kind of mess or gobsmacking disaster, and I never understood the dysfunctional core or source--much less the worldly worth of so much suffering, humiliation and pain.

I retreated deeper into the quieter, safer life of a staunch recluse. I kept the triggers away. I could breathe alone. I didn't irritate anyone.

However, while I am a textbook, typical Taurus, my story is of course not wholly atypical: Millions or billions of people can relate to any or many of those woeful bullet points. I hope to the Heavens not all of them, as I don't want anyone on this planet to feel as shattered, broken, life-wasted, and intensely depressed as I have and do. Sometimes I can't even feel my former, fierce, Taurean spirit that preceded me in birth. Or in lifetimes. (And I'll tell you what, THAT'S damn scarier than cancer, and far more deadly.)

Moreover, I say 'typicality' or uniqueness is indeed moot and is certainly not in my tone of rhetoric here. I haven't looked at GoFundMe before this launch and was never forwarded someone's case to help with (probably because I prefer my house and letters to cell phones and online media); But I sure as Sunshine know there are innumerable pleas for cancer assistance herein. Mine pales, I do well know.

Cancer is a vicious, villainous, sinister, ruinous and insatiable disease. It attacks like a shark smelling really healthy blood in clear, open waters. Indeed, there is nothing to say about cancer that hasn't already been said. It's horrifying. Please spread wide your generous acts, thoughts, compassion and INSISTENCE UPON A CURE. That's call-to-action #2.

But my most severe debilitations preceded my own breast cancer, and so I have yet to process the malignancy news of April 9th, and I can't yet fathom what happened when my breasts were shipped off to Pathology on June 10th, never to be seen again. I can't believe any of it, yet.

(Am I really writing this? What the hell just happened to me!)

My body is in a very odd state of defeminization, disconnect, mental and physical dysfunction, permanent disfigurement, grief, lymphedema. But I'm not ashamed in this department--

Because I BEAT breast cancer on that very surgery day, with the "extreme" decision to chop both. That cancer didn't have the guts to take on the rest of me which can't be spared, so it wisely didn't metastasize. No radiation, no chemo, so I still have my bad haircut. (And all tattoos, sorry Maw and Dad.)

The six, cancerous tumors were in my right breast and removed during my biopsy but regrew like a cluster of Taurean weeds by surgery day two months later. Additionally, multiple diseases were found in my left breast over a much greater and lumpier area. Therefore I was instantly and wholly correct and validated by my not-at-all extreme surgical election. I knew. I self-advocated. I've been growing lumps, bumps, cysts, tumors and cyst clusters for twenty-one known years, and I've had a few removed prior. They were always benign... until they weren't. So now I am scared about the fifty+ I can still feel everywhere.

And if I hadn't been so fed up with five+ years of bilateral breast pain three weeks out of every month, and zero initiative from all previous care providers, I wouldn't have gone in for my mammogram this year when I did; I would've skipped it. I was extremely stressed and had to sell my dream home three days prior owing to that crush injury and subsequent inability to work. Therefore, I was living in a camper in a nearby campground trying to cash-buy some house, some where, and start over. Again.

(I thought: What good will a mammogram do when they have gotten me nowhere since 2005?! I'm just a lumpy gal and I always will be.)

Cue call-to-action #3:

YOU CAN'T SKIP PREVENTIVE MEDICINE with all the micro-crap we're breathing, eating and drinking. Get the damn mammogram. Or, your body might swiftly and fatally mutiny without any time to back-up your life into The Cloud, or see Paris, Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids.

Just Nike-it every year, people. Incentivize it for your boob-toting friends and loved ones--one way or another!--if begging doesn't deflate or defeat ego and the delusions of infallibility. Share my story and contact me for plainer, blunt, humbling and sobering facts. Such as: Those right-side, six tumors were uber tiny and (perhaps only) spotted by their clustered presentation; I went into this year's mammogram predominantly for "lumpy left boob".

Think on that a moment. Went in for the left. Cancer on the right. And it was a very aggressive, fast-growing and fast-recurring cancer that goes big and doesn't go home once it decides to, shark that it is.

Post-op, I've had many challenges and one particularly severe, yet common, chronic complication (seromas) that I'm not through, which means I can't fully heal on my left side. My right side seems stable now. I've been in the ER many times this summer, and I've had several, darned uncomfy, needle drainings of the copious lymph fluid. I've heretofore declined to waste time or money on double reconstruction. It's also wholly impractical for the life I lead in construction and how often I get hurt without depth perception or stereoscopic vision thanks to ole one-eye.

By now, you've likely gone to the restroom at least once and come back to this essay with a second snack. Maybe you even walked the dog, or fed the kitties, kiddos or groucho-on-the-coucho.

I myself am also getting hungry and missing football after nearly seven hours of writing and editing this; So I'll take your cue and wrap this up with a description of my current climate, updates and goals (which are not quantifiable by dollars or time).

Please know (for those of you who didn't know my history):

1. On July 12th, 2018, I cold-turkey quit those aforementioned seventeen years of gold-medal, self-destructive, disordered eating rituals which were about control, not vanity. My recovery has been unusually perfect with zero relapses of any kind. That saved my life. I don't know why my heart kept going on for fourteen years with all the electrolyte abuse after arresting in early 2004. I would've cried "Uncle" and gone up to see if my Broncos fare any better in Heaven. But my heart pushed on, hoping my damn head might get straightened out. Call-to-action #4: You CAN beat addiction! You can beat it into a pulp; But you have to let yourself be helped.

2. My arms--especially the dominant right--are a major problem. In cold, I still go numb and can't so much as buckle my work belt or tear wimpy painters' tape. They're... a serious problem. I do my best. In very late Fall 2024, just shy of the winter off-season, I legally formed my home+garden handy work LLC with experience in multiple skilled trades dating back to 2004. Gardening even further back. 2025 was to be my formal launch and first big year. That did not happen. Couldn't happen. Therefore income is practically a non-factor this year. Simply put, I've had no W-2/regular income since very late January of 2024. If you knew about my two, VERY cool collector cars, those are gone. Got me this far.

3. This wonderful, dilapidated, stinkin' old house is in bad shape--worse than assessed at purchase, which happens. The plan was to blitz my LLC hard this spring, summer and fall, all while top-to-bottom renovating/updating my home on evenings and weekends over the course of nine to twelve months--or longer if my business really took off. Cancer obliterated all plans and hope for the successful work year I needed. Stopped the income train. The reno train.

4. Another thing "I used to be" is sans the knowledge of my own, genetic Autism and ADHD. This summer I received the gift of a lifetime wrapped in the diagnosis of "High IQ High-Functioning Autistic Female with Prominent OCD, ADHD and Complex PTSD", stacked upon most of what I already brought to my shrink's table. (Sorry Doc!) What I've come to realize as I try to process that news, too, is that it's way more life-changing, life-improving, life-rewriting than "breast cancer-free". This is quality-of-life, big big stuff. Bigger than any cancer.

Autism+ADHD mean: I really did the best I could, I fought like hell since childhood, I fell really hard countless times, and it wasn't all my fault. Even my blindness is associated with Autism. That floored me. Once I go deeper into my new therapies, let shame go, practice forgiveness and grace, and embrace this incredible blessing of neurodiversity bundled in Sunshine, that horizon will start turning gold again.

5. Insofar as my body allows, I'm working my house reno priorities in practical order to get it livable before the deep cold sets in. How or when I myself am fully 'renovated' post-cancer remains unknown. A hemangioma was found on my liver during my breast MRI and was recently ultrasounded. I will follow up with my Oncologist in January to see if it's enlarged; I will not think about it now.

In sum, I'm a veritable steam engine lacking steam. Two busted arms in a freak accident and cancer singlehandedly dismantled my ability to provide for myself and repair my home. If you are inspired to support my recovery-renaissance and help repair a very cold house with a few leaning walls, several broken windows, and major mechanical needs I'll find some poetic way to express such relief and gratitude. Any excess funds will be donated to my local GILDA'S CLUB chapter (Davenport, IA).

And letters/cards of encouragement, nostalgia or humor do me GREAT good as I'm still very much a letter writer and go with glee each day to mailbox. It's a precious act--don't let it go extinct like the dinosaurs by way of the asteroid of "social media" and cell phones. Call-to-action #5! Please. Come up for air. Put books in your kids' hands. I referenced a pencil in the Disclaimer--do you remember those? They smell really good--like books do! Remember books? Cook something that didn't start in a box. Get your Sisters into yearly mammograms which are often free as preventive medicine. Or even, ignore me and help someone far worse off as you read of others needing help on this platform.

Let me inspire any act of kindness or care, sympathy or empathy. Small can be mighty when 'The Village' heeds the call...

Peace and love to you all, and thank you for reading and sharing this onward.

S