It happened when I was a teenager. I lay awake in the blackness of an isolated campground, my stomach in knots, shaking at the sound of every small animal that rustled in the grass. A police car had just come around to warn us that a girl had been brutally murdered in the park where we were camping and that the killer had not yet been found. My imagination went wild, wondering if I would be the next victim. I think I was born feeling afraid… afraid of germs, spiders, snakes, car wrecks, airplane crashes, disease, criminals. You name it, I was afraid of it.

The earthquake violently ripped through my 13-story hotel in the middle of the night, causing it to sway precariously.  I was seven floors up, and the walls and floor swayed so dramatically that I braced myself, expecting tons of concrete to collapse above, burying me at any moment. 

The sharp blade of a "bolo" knife sliced through my hand and as I lay in the blood stained snow, the reality of death hovered over me. "Was I really going to die?" I grew faint and stumbled into the house and found myself praying to God...not for my life on earth, but for my afterlife.

 As I nervously peered down at the ground 100 feet below, my balance shifted. In a brief moment of blind panic, I realized I was going over the cliff's edge.
     There was no turning back. That's how I felt when a group of friends took me rock climbing a few years ago. The idea sounded like fun - until we arrived at the rock face and put on climbing gear to rappel down. I've never been fond of heights and didn't take much comfort in my only lifeline being a climbing rope thinner than my index finger.

 
            After a long pause on the telephone, the nurse finally said, "I will need to have the doctor call you back in a few minutes with the biopsy results."  
 
            I knew by her response that I did have cancer and that my life would be now going in a completely different direction than I had planned.  It happened in a moment.
 

"Look at what Caitlin's wearing," my classmate whispered to her friend as I walked past her locker. She had an ugly smile on her face. "She's TRYING to fit in." They both burst into giggles. I pretended that I hadn't heard them as I continued past, but my heart sank. And then a fierce, angry determination came over me...."I'll show them...." I muttered under my breath.