payal goyal

I'm a breast cancer survivor who decided to turn my pain into purpose. After my diagnosis, I realized I had two paths: I could sit in a dark room and cry, cursing my luck, or I could take what I learned from my cancer journey and use it to help others. I chose the latter because I didn't want to sit at home and cry. I wanted to go out and bridge the gaps I saw during my own experience. That's why my daughter and I founded Stronger Than Cancer, a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting breast cancer patients and making our community a better place to live. My work in this field is like a full-time job because this is what I want to do for the rest of my life - to support the community. Every single day, every single moment when I'm working for the nonprofit, I'm thinking about how this email can help someone, how this event can help someone. That's my real success. My typical day involves lots of outreach work, sending countless emails to businesses asking for donations for our care kits, reaching out to hospitals, nurse navigators, and mammogram centers to coordinate kit drop-offs and get feedback. I have at least two to three meetings a day, and I'm constantly connecting with other nonprofit leaders at both the national and local levels, including American Cancer Society, Triage Cancer, MD Anderson, Parkland, Medical City, Texas Health, Texas Oncology, and Bridge Breast Network. I need to keep finding resources because I want my patients to know what's available to them. When we have events, it takes five to six hours that day - we take our materials to the location, spend three to four hours at the event, then come back and post everything on social media and update our website and LinkedIn. We donate 100 care kits a month, providing 25 kits at a time every week to different hospitals and health centers. Each kit has 10-15 items like blankets and beanies. My greatest achievement is when patients contact us and say they haven't laughed in a long time, but our kit made them smile. I remember one lady at TCU whose friend was 36 weeks pregnant and had just been diagnosed with breast cancer without insurance. I helped her with all the resources available for uninsured people, and the thank you messages I received - that smile on their face - that is my biggest achievement. This summer, my daughter and I are working on a resource hub, which will be a website or app where we'll put all the resources together in one place - financial, legal, medical, nonprofit services, everything. When I was going through my cancer journey, I saw this huge gap. Once you're diagnosed, you don't know about these resources because if cancer isn't in your family, you don't even think about it. But once diagnosed, you need to know about so many resources, and currently you have to go to 50 websites and meet 25 people to learn about them. Our resource hub will provide everything at once, right from the start of diagnosis, so patients don't have to search endlessly. We'll list the resources with their website links, main contact person, and telephone numbers. We're starting with DFW area resources, then expanding to Texas, and eventually U.S. resources if the idea is successful. Before starting this nonprofit almost a year ago, I worked in the IT industry until COVID. My last job was with Citigroup in the IT department, where I worked as a database administrator and eventually moved up to cloud engineer. But after COVID, I started getting medical issues and had to quit my job. After a couple of years at home, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it took me six to nine months to get through treatment. Now I'm an ambassador with Parkland Hospital, doing three events with them per year and attending monthly meetings. I'm also an angel with Tiger Lily Foundation, where they train us to be ambassadors and teach us how to talk to fellow pink sisters. I'm constantly trying to grasp knowledge and education from big, reputable nonprofits and hospitals wherever feasible so I can educate myself first, then pass that education on to newly diagnosed people. I'm partnering with American Cancer Society for a 5K run during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, and with YMCA for a National Cancer Survivor Day event on June 7th, where we'll invite all survivors, their families, and supporters for a three to four hour event with recognition, awards, story sharing, speaker sessions, food, fun, Zumba, and yoga classes. The value that drives everything I do is kindness. That's my personal slogan now: kindness is free, but its impact is priceless. So be kind. You don't know what's going on in others' lives, what struggle they're going through, what life phase they're in. Social work starts with compassion, with kindness, with empathy - those are the virtues that matter. I attribute my success to my family, especially my husband and children, because they were with me throughout my cancer journey and I got really good support. My daughter, who's almost 16, is completely involved with me in this work, and my son is almost 12. This is the legacy I want to leave behind - showing them that everyone works for money through jobs or business, and that's necessary, but you also need to give back to your community without expecting anything in return. My daughter gave me the idea for the resource hub, asking why we don't create something to help other newly diagnosed people since I didn't have those resources. We brainstormed together and decided to collect all the resources step by step. The biggest challenge I face is fatigue from being a breast cancer patient. I'm on hormone therapy, so I deal with hot flashes and exhaustion. Some days I sleep two to three hours during the daytime and can't work, and I wish I could be normal and do more work to support other people. But I'm giving my 100% whenever my health allows me. I'm most interested in public health, and I'd like my daughter to pursue a career in that area too, because public health is the most important thing. You can have money, a house, cars, everything, but if you don't have health, there's no point having all those other amenities. That's what I keep stressing - keep yourself healthy, take all the preventative care, eat healthy, go for walks, exercise, and pay attention to mental health. I emphasize mental health a lot. I'm reaching out to hospital CEOs and the Dallas commissioner because they have so many resources and groups working in this area, and they can connect me with better organizations and people who can take my initiative to the next level. I have so many other projects in mind that I want to discuss with them to get support and take this to the next level. In one or two words, my life is pain to purpose.