She scaled back her campaign and kept her diagnosis a secret from the public. She didn’t like the idea of her situation potentially influencing the vote.“Once all the election formalities were completed, I made my announcement on Facebook,” she said. “I just encouraged everybody, please don’t be like me.”The unknown was far worse than the diagnosis, Laurie said.
“Once I knew, I knew how to deal with it then, but keeping my head in the sand was not the place to be,” Laurie said. “I’m a strong woman. … If I could ignore this, then somebody else who is not as strong as me is doing the same thing.”“If somebody reads this story and says they’re going to get checked out too, it’s all worth it,” she said.
On Oct. 17, her mom’s birthday, she rang the bell of hope at the Dr. H. Bliss Murphy Cancer Care Foundation. “I picked a word earlier that month, the word ‘Believe,'” she said. “That’s what I’m going to cling to: ‘Believe.’ We’ve been really positive. I said, ‘That’s it. Every day that I’m here happy and healthy is better than spending a day being worried and sad.’”