After cancer the fear never leaves you, but she’s fighting back In 1988, I celebrated my thirty-first birthday in a hospital bed, convinced it would be my last. Days earlier, I’d woken from a coma after two grand mal seizures—caused by three months of chemotherapy for the rare leukemia that had overtaken my body. Doctors used the word “grim.” My father bought me a cemetery plot. One month later in May, I received an experimental bone marrow transplant at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto—a long shot with less than an eight per cent chance of success. On that day, [...]