Meet The Bodybuilder Who Is Hitting Ovarian Cancer In Its Face

“I’ll get over it,” is Chayenn Shaw’s most loved phrase as she says it for everything related to cancer like going for chemotherapy, losing her hair, adjusting to baldness etc. Chayenn, a native of Florida, is a 23-year-old girl who was an enthusiastic bodybuilder until she found out that she had stage four low-grade serious ovarian cancer in August this year.

And all this happened only three weeks before her wedding with her then boyfriend and now husband Kaleb Shaw. Chayenn has been an athelete all through her life playing soccer, basketball, softball. Two years ago, she got interested in bodybuilding and last year, she entered a bodybuilding contest and was planning to do more shows until cancer happened.

However, cancer did not let her spirits down and she took it with positivity and courage, which shows from the videos that she started filming right from the beginning of her cancer journey. Chayenn had been filming videos from before and has a YouTube channel where she used to put fitness videos. However, now the videos are more about her documenting her experiences about cancer and spreading awareness about it.

This is the journey of a 23-year-old bodybuilder battling ovarian cancer

Her first video appeared on 19 August and she explained how she found a lump in her abdomen around June. Her gynaecologist told her it was probably a cyst or some torn abdominal muscles from working out too hard. However, the next month, she was hospitalised in the emergency room as she was having sharp pains and was unable to eat anything as she kept throwing up.

“I’m literally going to show you the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said on YouTube, adding, “I’m literally showing you guys everything just so everybody is more aware of ovarian cancer because they do call it 'the silent killer'.”

It has been four months since Chayenn has been going through Chemotherapy. She found out that it was not working out for her and in the process lost a major chunk of her hair which prompted her to go bald. She recorded an emotional video about it where she talked about how hurtful it is for her to see her hair being chopped off but she kept saying throughout the video that she will get over it.

In the course of four months, Chayenn has been diagnosed and rediagnosed of ovarian cancer and had to shift from Florida to Washington State so she could be close to her family and specialists. She has undergone surgeries to remove her reproductive organs, appendix, spleen and part of her colon, along with a tumour from her abdomen that was the size of a small beach ball. But the cancer is still in her lymph nodes.

“I decided to document everything right after I got diagnosed because I wanted to show people what cancer does to a body. I also wanted to show people that with a positive mind, you can beat this.” she told The Washington Post.

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The bodybuilder girl, who used to be 130 pounds, has been reduced to 102 pounds in just four months. However, the biggest inspiration is that none of her videos or social media posts demonstrates that she is depressed. Her bodily situation is something she has little control over, but the way she is fighting the battle against cancer is phenomenal. Her posts are all about positivity and optimism in the face of a deadly disease. And that’s what proves that she hopefully will emerge a winner.