Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn’t Destroy Other Families. | Anisa Palmer | Vegas Veteran Voices

Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn't Destroy Other Families. She grew up on 82 square miles of ocean in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Her mom was 38 years young when the diagnosis came. Anisa was five. Her youngest sister was one. Her dad raised four girls and one boy alone. Nobody showed up for their family. Nobody paid the rent. Nobody filled the fridge. Nobody walked through the door and said — we've got you while you fight this. She never forgot that. She shipped off at 21. Boot camp in South Carolina in the winter — hypothermia and pneumonia at the same time. Seven months later she was in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. First mission she got pulled off. Everyone else died. She came home and couldn't watch fireworks for years. Opened a box of rock-hard pound cake her grandmother shipped from home just to smell it. She got out. Drank a lot. Three months alone in a tiny apartment asking one question she couldn't stop: if I don't do this — what else am I gonna do? So she built I Will Survive Inc. Not an awareness campaign. Not a camera pointed at a kid with a fly on his face. A nonprofit that pays rent, fills fridges, and walks into homes where cancer has taken everything — because she knows exactly what that costs. She was five years old when it cost her everything. Thirteen years later she's still walking through those doors. In this episode Anisa talks about the mission she got pulled off and what she carried home from Iraq. The first patient she lost who didn't want to survive. The page in her book she couldn't write for seven years. What she told her sisters before she deployed. Why she became Miss January for Pin-Ups for Vets. And why the woman who has spent 13 years showing up for everyone else is still working on showing up for herself. Not a single tear or scar is ever going to be wasted. It's going to be used to bless the world. Vegas Veteran Voices is a veteran-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Every veteran's story is worth telling right.