Sharing a Cancer Diagnosis:
Stepsisters’ Story
O
livia and Natalie, relating it separately, recall
their first meeting the same way. “We met
at a splash pad,” said Olivia. “She just came
up to me and hugged me, and we started
playing,” said Natalie.
A pair of 4-year-old girls with long, brown hair,
making instant friends at the park. Not yet knowing they
would soon be stepsisters.
No one knowing that nearly a decade later, their easy
bond would be deepened by circumstances not only
unpredictable, but unthinkable. Unbelievable.
At 13, these stepsisters would be diagnosed with
cancer: the same type, in the same leg, just weeks apart.
Olivia was at the splash pad with her father, Chad.
Chad, divorced from Olivia’s mom, Bobbie, had Olivia
every other weekend and was dating Stacy, a single
mother to Natalie and Noah. If it sounds confusing, it felt
straightforward. “We immediately became a family of
five,” said Stacy. Chad and Stacy were married in October
2011, when the girls were 5, and although Olivia did not
live with them full-time, the family dynamic was very
blended. Even after Olivia moved away in the fifth grade,
the girls still saw each other on alternate weekends, every
other Thanksgiving, on Christmas Eve, and for a few
weeks each summer.
The summer of 2018
began the turning point in
both families’ lives. From
the very onset of Olivia’s leg
pain, Bobbie had doubts.
The pediatrician favored
a meniscal tear, but come
the day of the MRI, said
Bobbie, “I had already
been preparing myself
for this to not be just a
meniscal tear because I’m
a nurse, and I knew that
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By Kelly Cox
she did not present with the symptoms of just having a
meniscal tear.”
And she wasn’t the only one with concerns. On the
way into the scan, Olivia looked at her and confessed,
“‘Mom, I dreamed last night that I had to have my leg cut
off because this is cancer.’” Bobbie calmed her sobbing
daughter, but it was a little like the cards had been tipped
to show the hand. The look on the tech’s face just sealed
it. Their eerie feeling stayed an unspoken fear until the
phone call.
“The word ‘cancer,’ you know. As a mother, you have
these ‘We don’t go there’ thoughts,” Bobbie said. “The
whole time your baby is growing up, you worry: What
if? What if? What if? And cancer really is like the worst
what-if...”
It was “obviously sarcoma, a big, huge, funky tumor”
on Olivia’s right femur. She was immediately referred
to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and arrived
the day after her scan to an official diagnosis of
osteosarcoma—bone cancer—and the first of many weeks
of chemotherapy.
Almost right away, it seemed like the news would get
worse. Two spots showed up that might have indicated
metastases to the lungs. “When we found out that was
negative, that was a good
day,” Stacy remembered.
A dark day was soon
St. Jude Children’s
Research Hospital
to
follow.
campus exterior.
‘This can’t be real’
“It’s the craziest thing
anybody’s ever heard,” said
Bobbie. “Whenever I tell the
story, it’s hard for people to
know how to react because
they just can’t believe it.”
After about a month,
Stacy and Chad arrived at
Unbelievable set of coincidences
brings two families closer together.