Sharon Robinson

Sharon is originally from the US where she lived mostly in the Southeast. She was a physical therapist living in Georgia when she had her 2 birth children with midwives in South Carolina. A few years after they were born, she felt called to study midwifery herself. After graduating with a Masters Degree in Midwifery from SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, she and her family went to Cambodia. She and her husband, Dave, served as volunteers with the American Friends Service Committee in their Community Work with Disabled People (CWDP) project in Sihanoukville. While in Cambodia, Sharon also worked alongside a Cambodian midwife providing care to some of the pregnant women she met through her work and in the community. After Cambodia, she and her family (then plus one adopted Cambodian son) moved to New Zealand where she hoped she could provide midwifery care in a way that aligned with her calling. In the hospitals where she trained in the Bronx, the midwifery care was very medicalized. Circumcisions were even performed by the midwives. This did not feel aligned with what she had felt called to do as a midwife. She has now practiced midwifery in New Zealand for over 20 years and is a strong advocate for women's choice. She has also traveled quite extensively assisting women with births in Tonga, Mexico and the Amazon Jungle in Peru.

Sharon has recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and she reports being "well." In fact, she says, she is happier than she's been since she was a child. 

Her initial brush with breast cancer occurred in 2003 when she moved to New Zealand from Cambodia. Her first mammogram, done early due to her strong family history of breast cancer, showed something that looked suspicious. A lumpectomy was reported to have "gotten it all." Then again in 2015, she had an even more significant cancer scare. She found a painless lump in the same area where the lumpectomy had been performed 12 years before. This time she had a full mastectomy. And again, she was told it had been caught early and no chemo or radiation was recommended. After nearly 9 years, she had an abdominal CT scan for something else and was told that spots on her lower spine and pelvis were seen and warranted further investigation. Four months later, it was confirmed that the cancer that had been found in her breast had spread to multiple vertebrae of her thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, her sacrum and pelvis and her right temporal bone (a bone in her skull.) 

She is now almost a year on from the scan that first identified the suspicious looking "spots." She is still symptom free and living what she says feels a bit like a dual reality... She is "well" and has Stage 4 cancer. She says she feels better than she has felt since she was a child and the diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer has come with many gifts. How can that be? She thinks she has some pearls of wisdom to share.