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. 

Once again I was in darkness. My twin brother with whom I shared a room always fell asleep quickly. I enjoyed wrestling with him during the day, but I dreaded the wrestling match I faced each night. Out of the darkness imposing thoughts seized me like, "What would happen if I were to die tonight?" I didn't want to die, but it was the uncertainty of what followed death that really terrified me. In the morning after a particularly long night of struggling to fall asleep, I approached my mother in the kitchen.

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.

 
            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.