Best wishes from here too. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but my SO is a survivor, as was my mother until something totally unrelated got her, and we have a close friend who's been living with the "big C" for quite a while - so you may have many, many years to travel!
(Welcome to FT, too.)
ChaseTheMiles has good suggestions. A few other thoughts:
- Pick an airline to focus on, for sure. It's hard to accumulate enough miles to be useful without flying, especially if you're not in a position to charge tens of thousands of dollars to credit cards, and nearly (though not totally) impossible to achieve the elite airline status that makes traveling more pleasant. It's much better to earn 30,000 miles in one program than 15,000 each in two.
- You might want to share your FF goals with us, as they can affect the choice. Is it to earn award flights, upgrades, or something else? Also, where are you based, and is there a pattern to the location of the conferences and retreats you'd like to go to? (The type of fare you usually pay can also affect program choice, but in this case it sounds like that would be the lowest fare available.)
- You're now a member of another support group if you want to look at it that way. Many of us besides myself have personal or very close experience with what you're going through. Check out the CommunityBuzz forum for events in your area or that you might want to fly to. Some of them don't have to cost a lot: there's a very cheap introductory fare on Virgin Australia to next May's OzFest 6 in Cairns, Australia, for example.