Living On My Own And Buying A Home

When I was diagnosed, I lived with my twin sister. We were both working full time and sharing the financial responsibility that came with an apartment and so on. After getting a lung cancer diagnosis our living situation changed dramatically and I found myself relying heavily on my sister. She has a good job but was not prepared to take on my bills along with hers.

Homeownership seemed impossible

Despite that, she moved us into a house, went through the home buying process, and successfully purchased her first home. As I was going through treatments, many of them failing in the beginning, I thought that this house was where I was going to be living for a long time.

I tried my hardest to work through the diagnosis, but I did take about 8 months off while I was traveling for the first clinical trial that I would participate in. It was not as fun as it sounds, and it took a large toll on my finances. The thought of owning a home of our own seemed like a distant dream and one we would not ever be able to have.

Taking the plunge and buying a home

After a few years and getting married, my husband and I were itching to be in our own home. We thought about renting but that was not in the cards for us as we had a dog and he was my world. We looked at Zillow and only dreamed about homeownership. One day when we were sitting on the couch and chatting, we decided to fill out the online application which only ended in a lot of spammy calls, and see if we could be approved for a mortgage. We talked with our bank. The process seemed to be too good to be true and roughly a year later we moved into our own home.

Building new memories in our home

We have now been living in our own home for over two years. We have made a lot of changes and there are still so many to do and work on. My husband built a fence in the backyard to accommodate our fur babes and we would like to remove the pink carpeting in the dining room!

One of the best things to come out of our homeownership is that we get to host our families for get-togethers. While we have not been able to get together as much as we would like due to the pandemic, we have been able to celebrate many things at our home. Most recently we hosted Thanksgiving dinner. We often have my sister and parents over on the weekends and we love having Robert's mom over. It is nice to have a spare bedroom to host my sister and her family that live in Texas.

We have made our home as cozy as can be and I am super delighted to have conquered this challenge after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

Let me know in the comment something that you have conquered after being diagnosed with cancer!