Pick up the kids.
Go grocery shopping.
Go to work.
Throw a birthday party.
Make dinner.
Run errands.
These are just a few of the ordinary, everyday things that Sharon and Jenney, two stage 4 cancer survivors, are grateful for.
Before everything changed, they were living those ordinary days. Imagining futures that stretched forward without interruption.
Then came melanoma.
For Sharon Belvin, it arrived early — stage 4, at just 22 years old, when options were few and the outlook was grim. The kind of diagnosis that didn’t just interrupt life, but threatened to erase the future she hadn’t yet had the chance to live.
For Jenney Bitner, it came years later, in the middle of motherhood and a global pandemic. Headaches that escalated. A pregnancy unfolding alongside something no one could yet see. Until suddenly, everything came into focus: a brain tumor, an aggressive cancer, a timer that seemed to start ticking down all at once.
Two women, years apart, pulled into the same reality: the unbearable uncertainty of whether cancer would take away the lives they imagined for themselves.
Hearing the words “You have cancer” carries a weight that’s almost impossible to describe.
Sharon stepped into the unknown of a clinical trial — an early immunotherapy, unproven but full of possibility. It wasn’t just a treatment decision. It was a leap of faith, taken when there were few other places to land.
And then, something remarkable happened. The cancer disappeared. A future that had felt out of reach began to return, piece by fragile piece.
Decades later, that same science reached Jenney.
But not before everything she had to endure to get there — two brain surgeries, the birth of her son, her fourth child, weeks early, the physical and emotional toll of fighting for her life while being a mother at the same time.
Survival, in her case, wasn’t a single turning point. It was a series of moments — each one uncertain, each one requiring more strength than the last.
Then came the immunotherapy to give Jenney that survival.
I was diagnosed in February of 2020. By October of 2020, after four rounds of immunotherapy, there was no evidence of disease.
Both women lived through different chapters of the same story: one at the beginning of a scientific breakthrough, the other benefiting from how far that breakthrough had come.
And as fate would have it, the two would eventually meet.
After seeing Sharon highlighted in Breakthrough, the Jim Allison story, Jenney realized her husband and Sharon were from the same small town.
He reached out to her for Jenney.
What they did not know was that Sharon had made a promise in an MRI machine when she was first diagnosed that if she survived, she would pay it forward and help whoever she could.
So she responded to that message, and she and Jenney have been connected ever since.
Sharon was a beacon of hope for me. She had the exact same cancer as me and has now been in remission for 20 years.
Sharon was there through the brain surgeries and as Jenney started immunotherapy. And to this day, they continue to meet up, interact, and support other patients.
Because survivorship isn’t a clean ending. It’s a continuation, layered with everything that came before. It’s the quiet return to routine — school drop-offs, grocery runs, bedtime stories — carrying the weight of what was almost lost. And finding the village of people who can only understand that because they’ve been there themselves.
“I call it finding your family. It’s the family you get to choose. It’s the worst club with the best members.“
Survivorship is joy, sharpened by memory. Gratitude, complicated by fear. It’s knowing how quickly everything can change — and choosing, anyway, to lean into the life in front of you.
When Sharon met Jenney, there was no need for explanation. No need to translate the experience into words that someone else might understand.
They already did.
They understood the scans that still linger in the background. The anniversaries that don’t feel like celebrations so much as quiet acknowledgments. They understood the way cancer reshapes your relationship to the future — and, in different ways, to motherhood itself.
Sharon understood what it meant to survive long enough to imagine becoming a mother at all.
Jenney understood the terror of facing cancer while already being one.
Different experiences. The same impossible fear of what might be lost.
They understood what it means to come back from that edge — and to carry both the relief and the responsibility of having made it.
I don’t know how a cancer diagnosis doesn’t shape every single conversation and relationship for the rest of your life. It plays a part in every single thing you do.
Together, Jenney and Sharon represent something bigger than either of their individual stories.
They are proof of progress — not in abstract terms, but in lived, tangible ways. In years added. In milestones reached. In children growing up with their mothers still beside them.
One woman helped show what was possible. The other is living because of what that possibility has become.
“Cancer is such a lonely diagnosis. You feel like you’re the only one in the world who’s ever had it. But knowing that there are other people out there that you can connect with who are going through similar things. It’s vital for keeping you going.“
Because in the end, this isn’t only about survival.
It’s about what survival makes room for.
More mornings. More laughter. More ordinary, extraordinary moments that once felt uncertain.
More time to grow into the people they were meant to become — survivors, advocates, mothers.
More life.
I feel like I did not appreciate life until it was almost gone, and now every day is a gift, no matter how mundane.
