July 11, 2008. Angela Uhlenkamp remembers so vividly the day, the very moment, she received the news she had breast cancer that tears well up in her eyes just at the thought of it.

“It was the moment your life was taken away from you,” she says. “I was ignorant of cancer; I thought a cancer diagnosis meant you’re dead. To me, cancer equaled death… I felt like cancer was all around me, my grandfather had leukemia, my cousin has melanoma.  It was almost like I was surrounded, suffocating.”

Like many cancer patients, she went “through all the phases,” she says, denial, anger, paralyzing fear.  An active, vivacious, athletic 37-year-old whose sunny personality and warm smile light up a room, she loves the outdoors and enjoys her work. She was living a good life, her young son was happy and well-adjusted, and she was seriously involved with a wonderful guy, she says, the love of her life, Sean O’Leary.  Then she got cancer.

She asked, ‘why me’?  The diagnosis brought her and O’Leary to their knees, literally and figuratively, she says. Cancer can strike anyone.

“You go through all those phases, then you say, ‘OK, I’m going to fight this’,” and they immediately turned to their computers and “read everything we could find.”

When she received the diagnosis “I started a journal from that day forward,” she says. “It’s so important to keep a journal. You’re so upset; you can’t comprehend, you can’t digest it all. Writing allows you to think and reflect later on what you’ve taken in.”