Bunny Terry

Bunny Terry is a native New who grew up on a farm in northeastern New Mexico. Her first writing job, at six, was typing stories on index cards on her family’s Underwood, stories that were uncannily like the ones she read over and over in O Ye’ Jigs and Julips, her favorite childhood book. No one thought to save those index cards for posterity, although there is the theory circulated by her siblings that they will certainly be worth millions someday.

She appeared in a national magazine at the ripe age of nine, however it was not for something she had written. Rather, her crayon rendered likeness of a witch, pumpkin and black cat appeared in the October 1968 edition of Jack and Jill Magazine. Since then, she’s been a high school yearbook editor, writer for the Tucumcari Daily News (which is now the Quay County Sun), and a prolific blogger at www.ilovenewmexicoblog. She’s also written content for a wide variety of businesses in her career as a social media consultant, from birthing centers in Austin to French tablecloth companies in L.A.

Bunny was living in Santa Fe in 2012 when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Her plan had been to take the world by storm with a novel about a Sunday Night Supper Club, comprised of mostly single women in their 50s who were walking the thin line between tragedy and comedy while trying to find true love and enlightenment. She was determined to turn her daily writing practice into a decent novel. But that dream was thwarted by chemo brain (and perhaps some lack of talent and confidence).

Instead of the novel, she wrote 1,000 words a day about the cancer. Prior to this diagnosis, Bunny had been certain she was the healthiest person in the world, or at least the healthiest person in whatever room she found herself. She had a pain in her side one Thursday afternoon, went on a blind date, found herself sick to her stomach, and after blaming the blind date, discovered that she had a 5.5 cm tumor in her ascending colon that had perforated the colon wall and was bleeding out. There was a corresponding tumor on her liver.

For almost a year, Bunny underwent chemotherapy, had surgery to remove large chunks of her colon and liver, and then had chemo again. She was eventually declared NED, which she learned was an acronym for No Evidence of Disease. At the end of that time, she had over 365,000 words compiled, of which about 237 seemed retrievable.

However, thinking that perhaps her words had the power to help at least one cancer patient find hope, she took those 237 words and gathered up a few more and turned them into Life Saving Gratitude, which is a both a story of her survival and a handbook for how gratitude and positivity were indispensable tools in her survival.

Her survival led her to a life of advocacy for cancer patients. After lobbying with and serving on the Grassroots Action Committee of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a national organization dedicated to raising awareness and changing healthcare policy, Bunny was recruited to the Board of Directors for the Cancer Foundation for New Mexico. She currently serves as the Vice Chair of that organization and will step into the Chair role in August 2021.

Bunny received her treatment and recovered under the care of doctors in Santa Fe and is dedicated to helping other cancer patients navigate the treacherous waters of cancer recovery. She joined the CFFNM Board in 2014 and now serves as the Vice Chair of that group.

In addition to being a fierce advocate for cancer patients, Bunny also runs a successful marketing and coaching business and sells residential and farm/ranch property as a broker at Keller Williams Santa Fe. Her greatest love, aside from her family and her home state of New Mexico, is giving back with her time and assets. She is devoted to speaking and training her business colleagues while making the lives of cancer patients easier.

Bunny lives in Santa Fe with her husband and has four children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandson.

She is at work on a second book, Where I Come From, a collection of essays, mostly true, about the small town on the eastern plains of New Mexico where some of her 62 cousins live. She’s also developing 365 Days of Life Saving Gratitude, a combination planner and inspiration journal.

Bunny is available for speaking engagements beginning in Spring 2021.