It started with a quiet night on the couch. Kelly Lang, then 36, was flipping through channels when an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show stopped her cold. The topic? Young women under 40 with breast cancer. “I didn’t want to hear that,” she remembers. “I even tried to change the channel, but nothing else caught my interest.”
Something nudged her to keep watching — and to check herself. That night, she felt a knot under her arm. “I thought, oh, well, I don’t know what this feels like. I’m probably too young.”
At her next appointment, even her doctor brushed it off. But the knot stayed. Eight months later, the pain returned, and this time Kelly pushed for more answers. After an ultrasound and mammogram showed nothing, she asked the technician to press harder. The room went quiet. “Her face just dropped,” Kelly recalls. A biopsy confirmed the news she had feared: breast cancer, already spreading to her lymph nodes.
That day, Kelly’s journey began — one she now calls not a death sentence, but her “life sentence.”
How did you decide on treatment?
Kelly was never one to follow the crowd. “My doctors recommended a double mastectomy, but I turned that down immediately. It felt too aggressive for me.” Instead, she chose a lumpectomy.
That decision wasn’t popular, and chemo proved grueling. “The chemo to me was more brutal than the cancer itself.” When it began threatening her ability to paint, sing, and write, she stopped early. She also gave up tamoxifen within three months. “The bone pain, the weight gain, the depression — it just wasn’t for me.”
Instead, she pursued hormone replacement therapy — a choice that raised eyebrows then, but which, two decades later, has been reassessed by research. “I’m not saying my way is the highway. I’m saying it was my way.”
Did you doubt your choices?
Yes — especially when doctors pushed back. “They were like, Kelly, we’re trying to keep you alive.” But her inner voice was stronger. “It was almost like there was a supernatural power within me that knew the right thing for me.”
Prayer became her anchor. “I prayed constantly, and those prayers gave me peace about following my instincts.”
What about your husband, TG?
Kelly says cancer didn’t just happen to her — it happened to both of them. TG agrees: “When Kelly was diagnosed with cancer, I had cancer too, with her.”
He didn’t feel the physical pain, but he carried the weight of fear and uncertainty. “In the quiet times was when it would get bad. Late at night, my mind would drift to what if.”
But cancer also gave them perspective. “It made us live life larger,” TG says. “We wanted to make sure we got everything in our lives that we wanted to do, because you never know when life’s going to throw you a curveball.”
How did you cope together?
Faith, community, and humor became their lifelines. Friends brought meals, prayers, and laughter. Even her wig became a running joke. “One time at the YMCA sauna, I smelled this horrible smell — and it was my wig burning!”
Kelly’s dear friend Olivia Newton-John also inspired her with positivity and grace, even writing the foreword to her book, I’m Not Going Anywhere.
What advice do you have for women in rural communities?
Kelly says one tool is always within reach: self-exams. “They’re free. Lather up in the shower — soap makes things slicker and easier to find.”
If you discover something, don’t panic — most lumps turn out to be nothing. But catching cancer early can be lifesaving. “If I can survive it — and I’m a wimp — anybody can.”
What’s your message of hope?
Doctors once told Kelly to record goodbye videos for her children. She refused. “This is not the end of the road. It could be just the beginning.”
Now, more than 20 years later, she looks back at cancer as her “life sentence.” One that made the sky bluer, the grass greener, and every day more meaningful.
“If you’re facing this diagnosis now, please know — you’re stronger than you think, and you’re worth fighting for.”