What's the story that your scars tell?
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00:00You have to marry me. Who's gonna love you now that you have a 13-inch scar
00:04across your body? Now before you judge him for what he said, hear me out. I was
00:1119 years old and one night I get a sharp pain in my chest. I fall to the ground
00:19and I can hear this voice.
00:24You're sick.
00:26Dying.
00:28And if you don't do something about it, you're going to die.
00:33The next day I'm in my family practitioner's office, Dr. Martin.
00:39Nothing is wrong with you, Christina. Your heart is fine. Your lungs are fine.
00:47The chest pain you have is acid reflux. Take this medication. It will help you.
00:53Dr. Martin, I still have the pain. Something is seriously wrong with me.
00:59I don't have acid reflux. My boyfriend at the time, Alessandro, had mentioned to me,
01:05Cree, baby, why haven't any of the doctors ordered a CAT scan?
01:10Call the police, Dr. Martin, because I'm not leaving your office without a CAT scan.
01:16An hour later, Dr. Martin and I are negotiating and we negotiated down to an
01:20ultrasound and an upper GI. Two days later, I'm in a hospital across town
01:26about to start the upper GI and a nurse runs in. Dr. Martin called, we need a CAT
01:33scan, Christina, immediately.
01:37Three hours later, Dr. Martin called my parents to say, Christina has pancreatic
01:46cancer and six months to live.
01:52Three weeks later, I become one of the youngest pancreatic cancer survivors in
01:58the world. I had a Whipple surgery, which entails the removal of five of my organs
02:05completely or partially. I was in the hospital for another three weeks and
02:12then I was released with a 13-inch scar across my body and I thought the hardest
02:18part was over. I was in the cutest relationship at the time with Alessandro.
02:24I mean the cutest relationship you could possibly be in at 20 years old. It was
02:29pretty difficult for him to watch me face cancer and he thought the best way
02:35of never losing me again was to get married. I'm now 20, having an identity
02:42crisis and I was like, oh no, not right now. He got upset and scared and he said,
02:55but Cree, you have to marry me. Who's gonna love you now that you have a
03:0113-inch scar across your body? Now before you judge him for what he said, hear me
03:10out because I agree with you. It's shitty. In that moment, I actually thought about
03:18it. Who is going to love me with a 13-inch scar across my body?
03:28I left. I didn't leave Alessandro because of what he said. I left Alessandro
03:35because a part of me believed what he said and that scared me. It scared me to
03:42see my responsibility and my opinion of myself. So I ran away as fast as I could
03:48from the person, the thing that showed me my true self. And here's one of the
03:53hardest truths I learned about having scars. That forgiving those who carve
03:59them holds us accountable to forgiving ourselves for believing them. And it came
04:05down to this for me. I had to take responsibility for my inner voice. Every
04:10single day I had a choice to either be constructive or destructive with my
04:16thoughts, my actions, my opinions of myself. This was all birthed out of one
04:22non-negotiable that I had. I didn't want to be the woman who thought her 13-inch
04:26scar was ugly. And even though I didn't believe it was ugly a hundred percent, I
04:31didn't believe that it wasn't a hundred percent. My 13-inch scar is the sexiest
04:38thing about me. And whatever it is that you are ashamed of, it can become the
04:42sexiest thing about you. And I'm not saying that what happened to cause this
04:47scar is sexy. Ugh, hell no. But who you become because of it? That's sexy. Your soul is sexy.