• Age: 13 to 18
• Grade: 8 to 12

How does one live with cancer? Each person confronted with cancer has to make a choice, it seems, how to do this. The cancer experience—fraught with aggravation, apprehension, and with varying degrees of suffering—doesn’t appear to offer much by way of choice. Nonetheless, each person tries to find a way to persevere, and each has their own story to tell.

This book tells part of Erin’s story, and how she lives day-to-day in cancer’s shadow. Erin is a regular person, a wife and a mother, who is trying to put one foot in front of the other, proceeding in life like us all—but with the vital difference that at the age of thirty-nine she developed a life-threatening illness—stage four breast cancer. She has gone through a slew of treatments that work for a time, then seem to stop working. Erin lives with the knowledge that one day the oncologist will very likely have no more potions to offer.

Erin Richard's profile page

Tom MacNeil's profile page

About the Author

My name is Erin Richard, and I was born and raised in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Brian and Marilyn

Gallivan. I was raised in a close knit community called Whitney Pier, which is made up of numerous

diverse ethnicities. I graduated from Holy Angels High School (an all-girls school) in 1994. I met

my husband, Joseph, in 1995 and was married in 2001. We have a son Dylan who graduated

from High School and Community College. I also graduated in 2004 with my Early Childhood Education

from a local Career Academy training school in Sydney, N.S. I worked at ninety percent of all the

daycares in my local community for seven years, ranging from infants to school-age children. I then

worked in a local fast food restaurant fora year till I was diagnosed with cancer.

Erin says that developing cancer changed her from a shy person to someone not afraid to speak her

mind. Cancer also reignited her interest in photography, painting, and acting. She is now nurturing

these innate abilities, and putting them to work.

Cancer has made her more acutely aware of societal injustices, and has prompted her to fight for

longer sickness benefits for people with cancer who, like herself, can no longer work. Since cancer

overtook her life, she has become a basketball fan—a sport, prior to cancer, that she cared nothing about.

And now she has written this book. How many of us get to write books? With a husband, a son, a

father and mother, and friends; and with bills to pay, meals to cook, things to do and places to

go—she has a lot of life going on! It has been my privilege to get to know Erin. She has taught me,

by way of example, how to live life more fully.

I am reluctant to say this, but if it wasn’t for cancer I would likely never have met Erin. Not

Erin’s “bigger positive,” but certainly mine!

Tom MacNeil, Oncology Social Worker, Cape Breton Cancer Center, Sydney