From Stage 3 and Stuck to Strong Again: Lisa’s Story

Lisa Perry, Complement 1 member and cancer survivor

When Lisa looks back at her first months of cancer treatment, she remembers the noise - hospital machines, chemo drips, and the endless instructions from a dozen specialists. But the moment she truly remembers is the silence: the day her two dogs, Socks and Sunday, sat by the door, waiting for a walk she couldn’t take them on.

“I couldn’t even walk twelve steps from my bedroom to the family room,” she says. “Their little faces looked so dejected. That broke me.”

Lisa had just turned 56. A lifelong educator, mother, and planner, she was five months from retirement when a routine exam led to a double mastectomy, chemo, and radiation - all compressed into eight brutal months. She expected the treatment to be hard. She didn’t expect the recovery to feel even harder.

“I thought I’d be a totally different person when it was over,” she says. “But I didn’t realize how much energy, mobility, and identity I’d lose.”

Her diagnosis came at the height of COVID. When a doctor dismissed a suspicious lump as scar tissue, Lisa insisted on a biopsy.

“If I hadn’t pushed, my stage 3 diagnosis could have been much worse,” she says. “Being vigilant saved my life.”

But surviving didn’t mean living. The medication left her with severe joint pain. Even short walks exhausted her.

“I was afraid of losing my independence,” she says. “And honestly, I was afraid of losing my life.”

Then, while studying for a patient-advocacy certification, she kept coming across the same research: exercise, mobility, and meditation improve survival and quality of life.

“I knew what I had to do,” she says. “I just couldn’t do it alone.”

That’s when Lisa found Complement 1, a lifestyle intervention program designed to help patients regain strength and resilience through daily, personalized therapy - exercise, movement, and meditation.

Her first session changed something. “My coach met me where I was,” Lisa says. “If my knee hurt, she’d show me stretches. If I felt weak, she’d modify the routine. It wasn’t about pushing through pain - it was about building back safely.”

Over the course of her first year, the small wins began to add up. She went from barely completing five jumping jacks to thirty. From struggling to stand to balancing with confidence.

“Every number went up - my strength, my energy, my hope,” she says.
Today, Lisa calls it her ‘2.0 body.’ “I’m not trying to get back to who I was before cancer,” she says. “I’m becoming someone stronger.”

The woman who once couldn’t walk her dogs now walks them every morning.

For Lisa, Complement 1 didn’t just help her recover; it helped her rebuild. 

“If I didn’t have Complement 1,” she says, “I might still be stuck - depressed and dismal. Instead, I’m living and thriving again.”