"What makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay?"

You keep trying because you don't wish to be dying of cancer. You live with it and you live despite it. Your fight for the soul that must stay not die, bit by bit, inside the body that betrayed you so cruelly. You live as if you are, alive wholly and completely until the day that you truly die.

I'm not one to try to find the silver lining in having breast cancer. Cancer sucks. I'm not one to wax romantic about all the lessons I have learned about life because of cancer. The primary lesson I have learned is that cancer sucks.

Three years is a long time in anyone's life, but in a child's life, it is an eternity. She never attended middle school without feeling like the "cancer kid." At 14 years old, she barely remembers a time in her life before she was sick.