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The View From Here: Karate After Cancer


by Felicia Hodges

I’ve always been very physically active. In grade school it was daily kickball, tag and later, the sixth-grade softball team (I played first base). As a freshman in high school, a few moths after watching my uncle in the NYC marathon, I decided to give the track team a try. I ran and jumped my way right into an athletic scholarship, seeing the U.S. and earning a B.A. without any school loans hanging over my head after graduation.

The author with her training
partner, Ed, during their shodan
(black belt) test in 2009.
Through career shifts, marriage, pregnancy and divorce, I kept competing. In July 2004, I retired from the sport to go to graduate school and still keep up with my then 11-yr-old son. A few days after I started graduate school in August, I found a pea-sized lump in my right breast. The biopsy results came in at the beginning of October My cancer diagnosis was made just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Grad school’s Thanksgiving break was spent recovering from a bilateral mastectomy. In February, after watching my son do kata from the balcony of the dojo while trying to read my school assignments, I decided to take his instructor up on the offer to join the class. Since my track career had ended, I hadn’t even run to the refrigerator. I missed being active. I missed sweating.

And sweat, we did – thanks to the pushups, jumping jacks and ab work the sensei dished out. At least that was familiar – unlike the stances, katas and punching/kicking drills. I felt like the world’s least coordinated person for quite a while (which my sensei assured me was totally normal), but it felt really good to hit something. Plus we were encouraged to scream loudly while punching and kicking. Physically yelling while hitting a heavy bag proved to be pretty darn therapeutic - and a whole lot cheaper than counseling.

Three weeks before my last radiation treatment, I entered my first competition, (I wore a hard foam protector to keep the radiated chest from getting blasted too hard). That did it: my passion for a new physical activity was ignited.

Just about five years after hearing “I’m sorry – it’s cancer,” I earned my black belt in USA Goju Karate. Today - almost 14 years after diagnosis, I’m a third-degree black belt and I teach karate to kids (and sometimes their parents) in the same town I started learning in. 

 Through all the physical changes breast cancer brought, karate was the one constant - proving that I may have had cancer, but cancer didn't really have me because I could do stuff that I'd never even tried before my diagnosis. I'm glad I donned a gi and decided to line up in the back of that class, I really am. Sweating is good for the soul. 

 Felicia Hodges is the editor of Tri-County Woman Magazine. This essay originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2018 Issue.
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