Cancer makes cents: Diane Christoffel’s character sketch.

Diane Christoffel lives with no regret. At fifty-four, she’s lived through a real-life
nightmare that, if dreamt, would cause most people to wake up covered in a cold sweat.
But unless Diane told you about her ordeal outright, you’d never guess. Her bright eyes
and continuous smile betray nothing of her past, and everything about her outlook on
life.

In June 1995, after finishing some antibiotics to clear up an infection, Diane still felt
some tenderness in her right breast, so she headed back to her doctor. Not knowing
exactly what it was that she was requesting, she asked her doctor to somehow poke the
tenderness. He responded by performing a needle biopsy.

Several days later, Diane’s biopsy results came back. What they revealed was enough
to instill fear into the most steadfast of hearts: inside Diane’s right breast was unusual
tissue, and lots of it. The next logical step was surgery. Diane’s doctors needed to see
exactly what was going on a few millimeters beneath her skin.

Once the doctors had her on the operating table and opened her up to take a look, the
prognosis wasn’t good. The surgery revealed that the abnormal tissue within Diane’s
breast was everywhere, it just went on and on, so the doctors removed it all. Later tests
revealed that there had been no healthy tissue left at all. It was then that Diane learned
that the Big-C had come knocking on her door. And although the cancer hadn’t yet
become invasive, Diane opted for a radical mastectomy. She decided it was best to be
rid of the breast entirely than to risk the spread of cancer cells to healthy areas of her
body.

After recovering from her mastectomy and the reconstructive procedure that followed,
Diane’s life returned to normal. For three and a half years she celebrated birthdays,
anniversaries, enjoyed evenings at home with her family, and lived her life completely
cancer free. That is, until December 1998, when a check-up revealed that the incision
site of her previous surgeries was full of cancer. And this time the disease wasn’t willing
to play nice. It had already become invasive.

During the second week of 1999, Diane went back under the knife so her doctors could
figure out if the cancer had progressed into her body. It had. The cancer was galloping
through her body. She had chemotherapy. She had radiation.

In her second week of radiation Diane discovered new lumps where the right side of her
right breast used to lay and thought to herself, “this is not good, this is really not good.”

At her next treatment, Diane showed her radiologist the lumps. By the time she arrived
back home after her treatment, there were two messages from her surgeon asking her
to come back to the Pasqua Hospital. That was a Friday, and on the following Monday,
Diane was back in surgery. It was her forty-third birthday.

In her darkest hours, amid all the chemicals and poisons cursing through her veins,
Diane never felt the fear of death. She put her life into God’s hands and believed that
hers was a win-win situation. If she died, it would be God who took care of her family,
and she would ascend to eternity to be with the lover of her soul. But it was life that she
wanted, and so she never gave up.

Throughout her diagnosis and treatments, Diane never played the blame game. As a
devout Christian, she never wondered “why me?” Knowing that God would never give
her more than she could bare, Diane relied on his wisdom, strength, and the prayers of
those around her to supplement her medical treatments.

And it worked. A few days after her surgery, Diane received the best news of the year:
the lumps were cancer free. Somehow, within the chaos that is breast cancer, Diane
found peace and kept it close to her heart no matter where she went. When she
received the news there wasn’t the ecstatic revelation that most might expect. Instead
Diane greeted the news with calm, thinking “oh good!” because somehow she had
somehow already known she was healed.

This miraculous news didn’t stop Diane’s doctors from continuing her treatments. She
was lamb basted with as much radiation as they could possibly give her.

It’s been a decade since Diane kicked cancer to the curb, and was declared cancer-free
by her doctors. But that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten about the disease, nor the
hundreds of thousands of people it effects every year.

In an effort to give back and help others win their fight with cancer, Diane participates in
the Relay for Life, and she gleams a great sense of comfort from the camaraderie she
shares with other survivors. During her first survivor walk, Diane wept. She wept for the
awesomeness of the walk, for the applause that all survivors are given, and for all the
experiences her survival has granted her. She’s gone on a cruise with her husband,
she’s seen her son get married, and enjoyed the birth of her grandchildren. For Diane,
life is good.