Debbie Wilson is thirty-one years old; her days full of the joys and obstacles familiar to everyone navigating the American Dream. On the verge of launching her career as a teacher, she is the busy mother to two young boys–and her husband, Chuck, has just left the security of his career in the Navy amidst the economic crisis of 1987. The steady rhythm of her everyday is disrupted one morning when her soapy fingers discover a marble-sized tumor on her left breast. The life Chuck and Debbie Wilson fought so hard to build is turned upside-down as cancer takes the wheel–but little did she know that from that desperate moment in the shower would be birthed one of the best marriage books, biography books and inspirational stories of our decade.

She spent the next twenty-eight years resolutely battling one type of cancer after another–including one of the rarest forms of cancer in the world. Chuck and Debbie never set out to become the epitome of “in sickness and in health,” but as