BE WELL When a cancer journey becomes an education in holistic, cannabis-based healthcare By Amy Senk Justine Amodeo was 26 years old, alone in New York City, and had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “I was working as a magazine editor,” she says. “I had just left the New York Times and had started a job at Omni magazine when I was diagnosed, literally the first week of work.” She went through a traditional cancer treatment protocol — chemotherapy and surgery. It didn’t work. Two years later, the cancer was back. “I was told I had a 50 percent chance of surviving this time,” she says. “If I was going to die, I wanted to leave my mark on the world and write a novel. I applied to graduate schools on the ocean and in
Photos courtesy of Justine Amodeo
the forest. I had this romantic idea I would go there and breathe my last breaths into a book.” Her odyssey brought her to California, where she found doctors who specialized in Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as well as a husband, family, magazine editing job and, ultimately, a new career journey as a cannabis expert and caregiver at Laguna Beach’s Earth Alchemy Holistic Care. Like most odysseys, Justine’s path had twists and turns after following her dream to UC Irvine’s MFA program in the late 1980s. She continued her journalism career, editing, writing and wandering the globe to craft epic travel pieces. She married and had two children — something she’d been told would likely never happen for her.
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