Two years ago, I was negotiating a contract for a seaside home in the state of Maine. Yep, we were finally leaving Arkansas and we couldn’t have been happier.

Me: because I had survived metastatic breast cancer, come out swinging and now I was really going to make my life count. Because having a near-death experience and living to tell about it…well. At some point, you think, “Well, if that happened and I came through it, I must have some greater purpose.” Right? 

The question is….after the cancer journey has destroyed everything you thought you once knew…what could that purpose possibly BE?

So, after months and months of sitting with it – and feeling particularly “in a hurry” to come up with something…I mean, come on, there’s no more time to waste! I’d decided: a good friend and I and my husband were moving to Maine to open a retreat center for women with cancer…though we were starting as an Airbnb. 

Hubby was happy because he had survived me surviving breast cancer…and he had hopes of turning this waterfront mansion into a boutique wedding venue. 

The first time we’d visited the place, my eyes followed his vanishing form as he disappeared down the tip of the wooded peninsula to the water’s edge where he stayed for some time. When I eventually made it down there – after wandering the mammoth house and grounds – and took his hand, he’d turned to me with excitement….something neither of us had had in some time…and said, “Can you see it?” as his hand gestured here and there as it drew the scene in the air before me. “The tents here. The bonfire here. The vows here. The couple will enter from over here.”

And the reality was, I could see it. Plus to hear him that excited again, after all that we’d been through. Well, it was more than enough to convince me. We were going to do this, details be darned. It was now my life’s mission!

So, we did. We negotiated and renegotiated contracts. Moved cross country. Sold a vehicle. Shipped three cats. Moved in with our best friend. And started cleaning and repairing the behemoth creature of a house and grounds (which had been a multi-unit tenant dwelling for some years)…so, you can imagine the mess.

And with our fervor, we made the first of many mistakes: not signing written contracts or letters of agreement with our best friend-now partner from the get-go. 

I, for one, was so gung-ho and my husband was working his tail off, day in and day out, with one drama after another, that we didn’t take the time to make things formal.

Mistake number one.

Still fresh from being declared N.E.D. (no evidence of disease, the first step toward becoming truly “cancer-free) a few months before, the desire I had to “make my life count” swung my pragmatic business mind right out the window during 90% of these initial transactions.

I let things slide with our business partner, when she didn’t pull her weight. I looked the other way when she failed to follow through on a number of important things. 

Bottom line: I allowed my Taurus personality and my post-cancer “just got out of jail mostly unscathed” mindset let her skate on things I would never allow anyone else in business to get away with. At least, the pre-cancer JuliAnne wouldn’t have. And yet, now, I did.

My Scorpio husband on the other hand was having none of it. My desire to make it all work and ramp up a new business in record time so that it was financially profitable…well, let’s just say emotions were high and my head for business was only partially in place. 

They say chemo does strange things to the brain. And I’ll be the first to agree. In retrospect – two years past now – I admit I made some less than solid decisions.

On one hand, who could blame me? Who expects a woman who’s just been through hell and back to make good decisions or even make sense, for that matter? What is there about going through cancer and almost dying would make one think that I should make sense, then or ever again? The reality is, an experience like this changes you.

Four months in on our dream Maine. project, in the midst of my husband and I working 12-hour days to make this dream of ours come true, the three-way partnership imploded before it exploded. Nasty words were spoken. Accusations were made. Emotions ran high. And it got ugly. Fast.

It is not a time period that I look back on with great pride.

And yet, I put down my foot down on inconsistency, which is something I needed to do. It was admittedly late (with my best friend) and overdue (with my husband) but I learned some hard and necessary lessons.

Even so, I was devastated. This woman had been one of my best friends for 19 years. And the friendship was now clearly, over.

In the midst of the fire storm of our friend moving out of our shared living arrangement, I returned to Arkansas for my three-month PET scan. Two days after my scan in an appointment with my doctor, it was as a second bomb splattered across the screen of his computer. New cloudy images had shown up in my right breast. It didn’t look good, he said. He needed more tests.

When I wandered into the parking lot a few minutes later, my mind had gone so blank with shock, I couldn’t find my car. In the moment of staring at those images on the screen, I was flashing back to the nightmare of my initial diagnosis when the days of waiting before the biopsy results came back had seemed never-ending….it had been a slow-moving train whose destination had derailed our entire lives.

How could this be happening again?

The second test took a few days to be scheduled, which required changed flights and harried phone calls back to Maine. With all the ramp-up of starting the new business then the drama of the imploding friendship, of course my stress level had been high….who was I kidding? 

The hours and days ticked by until I found myself staring at a different screen in a different doctor’s office and hearing those dreaded words I thought I had put behind me: confirmed, cancer.

As I boarded my flight back to Maine the following day, my oncologist rang. “JuliAnne,” he said, “You have two choices. One, a double mastectomy and two, we can try more chemo.”

As hard as I’d fought to keep my D-cup breasts to this point, I didn’t skip a beat. “Let’s schedule the mastectomy,” I replied. “I’m not doing chemo again.”

“I want you back in two weeks,” I heard him say. “You need this out as soon as possible. I’ll call the surgeon now and tell her to expect your call.”

Five hours later, I was landing in Portland, Maine, walking into the waiting arms of my husband. Stunned, again. Shocked, again. Wondering again: what had I done wrong?

These are thoughts and emotions that every woman – every cancer patient – goes through. “Is there something I could have done different? How could I have avoided this?”

The reality is that by that point, it’s usually too late. In my case, the time bomb was ticking, again. And I wasn’t prepared to take any chances with this precious life I’d been granted, again.

We were going to war, and this time, coming out of it, I really would be a wounded warrior.

The rest of Round Two – in retrospect – was a blur and it also dragged.

In the days following my return to Maine, we realized that with my trusted medical team back in Arkansas and now that my husband and I were the sole operators of our Airbnb/burgeoning retreat center business, the timing of having one of our team down (me) for several weeks or months recovering from surgery was less than ideal for the business.

Clearly, I would not be changing sheets for five bedrooms for weeks, if not months, following my double mastectomy. Much less, lifting things or cleaning or doing a number of things I needed to be doing. 

I called some friends who’d been down this road to compare notes with them. How long did it take them before they were back to “normal” functioning?

The range was broad: a month to five months.

The ambiguity between the answers frightened me. How would we make it?

What do you do when you’ve invested all of your savings and your energy into a massive undertaking only to have two major pieces of it blow up? 

We spent many tearful nights staring at the ceiling. We didn’t like any of our choices and yet, we knew my health had to be first. The reality we knew – though we didn’t want to believe it – was that there were no guarantees. Would surgery be the end of it or would there need to be more? 

But abandon our dream property before it even took off? Yes, we’d been successful in those first five months – even achieving the coveted Airbnb SuperHost in record time, but we’d yet to break even. Hours and weeks and months of in-kind sweat equity would be lost, down the drain, in addition to thousands of dollars invested of furniture, décor and property TLC.

And yet…how do you choose, when it’s between your life and a property/business? How do you value what’s more important, when one hangs in the balance and if not treated correctly, could entail the failure of the other anyway?

It was a heartbreaking choice, but somehow we arrived at it: we would leave Maine. Break the contract on our dream property and return for my surgery to my trusted medical team in Arkansas. Since there were no guarantees on my recovery time nor what else, if anything, might be necessary, we simply didn’t feel we had any other option.

I’d be lying if I said it was anything but devastating. In a short five months, this seemed dream vision of a retreat center for women with cancer and the waterfront wedding venue dissolved before our eyes. Our losses outweighed our gains by a long shot and were all we could see as we packed up the moving truck and drove 2,000 dreary miles back to Arkansas.

After three and a half days of driving, when the city limit sign for Little Rock came into view, I burst into tears. Reality sank like a stone in my gut; it was real. We were back in a place we had never planned to return. One of our deepest friendships was over. Our dream project – which was supposed to make my life mean something – was lost. And soon I would join the ranks of thousands of other deformed bodies, with my upcoming double mastectomy.

Talk about a horrible homecoming. I felt like all hope had been lost. It was a very dark time.