Council on Aging’s Lisa Crites details life of impromptu healing
When you experience tremendous loss in life— unexpected death of a parent, divorce, a cancer diagnosis and a number of other debilitating sicknesses while trying to launch a company—the only thing you can do on a repeating basis to survive is keep picking up the broken pieces and move on.
But when communicating messages is your profession, and you have an ‘A-ha’ moment that you realize you aren’t really broken, then the next obvious step is to write about it.
That’s how “Beautifully Unbroken” came from the vivid experiences of Lisa Crites, a media relations specialist for the Osceola Council on Aging who spent a number of years in TV news as a medical reporter.
Crites penned the book to share her experiences of loss, pain, suffering and the recovery from them she found in unexpected places, like becoming an entrepreneur and a published novelist.
About a decade ago, after realizing that a breast cancer patient, or anyone recovering from chest-area surgery, couldn’t do something as normal as taking a shower, she envisioned, developed, marketed and patented The Shower Shirt to cover port entries from water-borne infections. It was along that path that she was encouraged to write a book about her experiences—just another way she pieced her life back together.
“(Writing the book) was the same reason I created The Shower Shirt; to help people,” Crites said. “Bringing a medical device to market, getting intellectual property, fighting bureaucracy in Washington … I kept thinking, if I can help one person with The Shower Shirt then it’s going to be worth all of this.
“As a journalist, as an accidental inventor, we go through life and manage what comes to us. We have to manage it with grace, manage it with ethics, manage it with faith, and I think I had done all that. But I had forgotten how I had done it until I started writing the book and I would think, ‘Wow, I did that, how did I do that? Oh my gosh!’ in the same way, I’m writing this book with perseverance with resilience, with love, with authenticity.”
While the “how” of Crites doing all of this would be as unique to her as it would to a reader learning about the struggle, the “why” is the same—recovery.
Through The Shower Shirt, she said she found therapy.
“If you were a dog who needed a bath, there were dozens of products online designed to make that process easier. But if you were a woman recovering from breast cancer surgery, you were expected to go to your kitchen pantry and grab a trash bag,” Crites writes in the book. “I was so incensed by what I had experienced that I did not want one additional patient to feel the way I did.”
Building on the recovery, she pens: “I was building something positive. I was reclaiming control of my life. What I felt was becoming my calling kept me alive in ways medicine could not. It anchored me during the mental and physical distress that threatened to overpower me … For the first time since my diagnosis, I felt in control again. And that made every ounce of the pain worth it.”
Along the way she learned enough about herself and empowerment that she learned lessons best shared on a speaking tour, and through her book. A powerful one is that ‘FEAR’ is really an acronym (False Emotions Appearing Real).
“I’ve always felt very broken. But my mentality has become, when I feel broken, I fight harder, I pray harder, I move faster,” Crites said of the book’s title. “This is a book about a woman who fought for future breast cancer patients. This is a book about a woman that entered some of the most powerful rooms in this country to fight.
“Most importantly, this is a book about fighting for me.”
