Chapter 1 - The Diagnosis

Imagine that you are a beautiful, young, successful woman who has just received her Master’s Degree in Counseling. You are working a full time job to pay the bills, a part time job to fulfill your internship hours and another part time job to pay off your new education. Somehow, you still make time for friends and enjoy a good movie, wings at the local sports club, and boating on the lake. You have a new boyfriend. He is handsome, hardworking, easy to talk to, and most importantly…makes you feel like the most important person in the world. Life is good! Except for that nagging pain in your back. You see a doctor…muscle relaxers don’t fix that “pulled muscle”. You see a chiropractor…steroids don’t fix that “herniated disk”. After several months of increasing pain you have scans done at the Sports Medicine Clinic and your entire world crashes around you in a matter of seconds! Just 2 weeks after your 28th birthday you are told that you have stage 4 breast cancer. It has already spread to your spine, hip bones, ribs, and one lymph node under your arm. You try so hard to process what the doctor is saying. You should be asking lots of important questions but all you can think is CANCER, I’m Dying…CANCER…STAGE 4…I’m DYING…HOW DO I TELL MY MOM…THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENIG TO ME!!! But it is. You are shaking and you don’t hear yourself ask the question, but you must have because he says “Maybe a year…but probably less.”

You leave the office and sit in your car crying hysterically. You have to tell someone. You need to talk about it to make it seem real but you can’t tell your mom. You are her only child, her best friend and she might not be able to take it. You are terrified but feel an overwhelming need to protect her. You call your aunt instead and when she picks up the phone the words just spill out. “I have stage 4 CANCER. It’s spread everywhere! I’m DYING! I can’t tell mom! PROMISE ME you won’t tell mom yet! Oh God, I’m Dying!” You repeat everything you can remember about what the doctor said….more tests, appointments to make…discuss treatment…You don’t know if you even want to treat it. If you are going to die anyway why be miserable with chemotherapy and more sickness? It’s hard to breath, your shaking, and that pain in your back is taunting you. You can picture the pain for what it really is now that you know it’s true identity. You think you can actually feel yourself dying. You can feel the Cancer eating away at you and you hate your own body. Everything you have accomplished thus far…everything you know and everything you have done..is irrelevant. None of it is important. None of it can help you now. The entire focus of your life has been changed in the past 2 hours. You remember being told “we can operate on the breast, but there is currently no cure for cancer once it is in the bones.” The realization of what that means floods you. You will not see your 29th birthday. You will never open the private practice you and your aunt dreamed of opening together. You won’t get married or have children. You won’t take that trip that you and your boyfriend had been planning.

You know you’ll talk to your mom tonight and you won’t be able to hide it. You decide to tell your parents, but you sit in the parking lot for a long time before you head that way. You want to pull yourself together before you go tell them. You are about to change their entire world. You fear it might destroy them!


This story is true. It is about my niece Kecia. She is my sister’s only child and my only niece. Not that it would matter if there were others. Our loss would be the same. I was only 10 when she was born and I love her dearly. I had originally gone to school to be a teacher. She had gotten her Bachelor’s in business but several years ago we were both looking for a career change and after much searching we decided to go back to college together. We would both get our Master’s in Counseling and open our own private practice. We are opposites when it comes to personality. I am outgoing, consider myself funny, very social, and enjoy a crowd. Kecia is quiet, a perfectionist when it comes to herself, hates the lime-light, enjoys small groups of close friends, and doesn’t think I’m so funny. But we are both avid animal lovers and we agreed on the path that our business should take. We were determined to help others using animal assisted therapy rather than just traditional counseling and we spend the next 2 years of school planning for our futures. We took all of our classes together. We studied together, critiqued each others papers, complained about teachers, and always worked together on group projects. Kecia said she hated sitting with me in class because she liked to sit on the back row and “just blend in”, but I always raised my hand to join class discussions. I sometimes embarrassed her because something said in class would strike me as funny and I would get us both giggling to the point of inappropriate. We would try to be polite but we couldn’t stop laughing and eventually we would excuse ourselves from class, laughing so hard there were tears in our eyes. Kecia told me one day after just such an event.. “if we we’re related I wouldn’t even be your friend.” Kecia worked full time while going back to school and I had just had baby #3 when we enrolled. Baby # 4 would come just a few weeks before we took our state board exams. It was not easy. But it is an experience I wouldn’t trade. That time we spent studying, worrying, and passing together is priceless to me. It quite possibly gave our relationship the strength it would need to face the days that were ahead in Kecia’s future.