There’s never a good time to get the call. Kim Hart was in the office at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday in 2009. She was the only one left. Her husband, Jim, was out of town. She was looking forward…
Six weeks every morning. Day in, day out. Tamiko Bilbro-Nicholson’s husband changed the dressing for the open wound on her breast after infection set in from cosmetic surgery. Even though the 46-year-old Pawnee woman’s breast cancer was caught early, a…
Telling your children that you have a life-threatening illness is tough enough the first time. Laura Beth Pemberton had to do it twice. Three years before she discovered a lump in her left breast in June 2017, which led to…
Ally Fairfield was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 23 years old, and an army mobilized to fortify her for the difficult journey. Ally’s Army, a group of 30 family members and friends has rallied around the owner of…
Kara Pecoraro woke up panicky from a vivid nightmare. In it, she needed to see a doctor, but no one was willing to take her to one. When she awoke that night in mid-February 2016, the New Berlin mom and…
Facing cancer wasn’t the hardest thing Jennie Creswell ever had to do. Telling her then sixth-grade son, Harrison, that she had been diagnosed with cancer was. Her son’s first words nine years ago when he heard the news still make…
The call came on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day seven years ago. Michelle Buscher, then 42 years old, was soundly slumbering, enjoying the last day of a three-day weekend before going back to work. Her phone rang promptly at 8…
When Carol Harms went in for her annual mammogram this February and a suspicious spot was found, she didn’t give it too much thought. There’s very little presence of cancer in her family. And she had been feeling intermittently unwell…
As program coordinator of Memorial Medical Center’s palliative care program, Kelli Fisher has been a source of strength and stability to hundreds of patients for the last decade, many of them facing their own battles with cancer. What she didn’t…
When Lisa Woods received the news she had breast cancer, she wasn’t surprised. As the seventh woman in her family to have breast cancer, she was braced to hear the news from her doctor one day. Lisa, who’s 46 and…