Saying Boo to Cancer
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Runners
By Molly Hensien

When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up or fight like hell.
~Lance Armstrong

Boo. To me, it’s not just a word used to scare ambitious trick-or-treaters on chilling Halloween nights. It’s not a decorative term painted on fall home furnishings either. Surprisingly, it is the unique name of my mom — a Sylvania, Ohio, resident lovingly known by her family and close friends as “The Lance Armstrong of Ohio.” Boo Hensien did not compete in the Tour de France but she did snag the third place trophy in the Sylvania Triathlon. Doesn’t sound too impressive? Well she did it two days after she completed her last radiation treatment in her fight against breast cancer.

It was a snowy February day when my mom found a lump in her left breast. She didn’t tell me. It was just a few days before my twelfth birthday and she didn’t want to ruin my excitement. The very next day the lump was biopsied. Two days later was a day my mom will never forget, in fact it is a day that she remembers in extreme detail. She was seated Indian style on the kelly green carpet of her bedroom floor, folding my father’s white v-neck undershirt when the telephone rang. It was one word from the voice on the other side of line that made her heart drop. One word that made her body drop back down to the carpet she had been sitting on just seconds earlier. One word that made that cold February day the scariest of her life. Cancer. (Keep reading)