MIDLAND, Texas — At the Hope House on Sunday, people gathered to celebrate National Cancer Survivors Day.
"Keep going, keep fighting, focus on the end goal which is to beat everyday that you fight it, everyday you live through it is a day you win," said Mellany Gray, a survivor who spoke at the gathering.
Many women and men who have fought an unthinkable battle and won, including Gray who fought cancer for over seven years.
"Metastasized from my leg to my lungs, to my chest wall abdomen, diaphragm and heart lining and from there to my brain, from there to my liver, multiple radiation treatments, chemotherapy and inevitably I was given the option to take immunotherapy which after being on that for a substantial amount of time everything was gone and I was able to start living a normal life without the inconvenience of cancer," Gray said
Mellany thanks her family and medical teams for helping her get through.
"They fight for you just as hard as you're fighting for yourself and all the love and support from your family and your family and you just can't do it without that," Gray said.
Winning the battle also taught and inspired survivors lives in different ways like: "Live every day fully," "acceptance," "life is too short to skip a beat," and "I can handle anything that comes my way."
"If I had given up, after I had lived longer than they expected me to live, I never would have had the option of taking the immunotherapy drug that inevitably took the disease out of my body," Gray said.
All survivors were given a flower to take home.
"Clap everybody into being a survivor and it's so important to have the community supporting us so I can not thank Casa Verde enough for giving us a national survivor day cup to every survivor that was here today and their family," said Christie Gesell, Associate Director with Gift of Hope.