In 2004, Dana Mattingly was playing racquet ball with her daughter, when the ball hit her on the side of her breast. The injury bothered her for a while. She started to suspect there was something else going on. Mattingly went to get it checked out, and her physician removed a mass from her breast in January 2005.
Lab results revealed the mass to be a malignant tumor.
Mattingly discovered she had breast cancer a month before she celebrated her 33rd birthday.
Martha Courtney once said that she would rather have a gun pointed at her than have to face cancer. Three months later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
"I always feared chemotherapy, the pain, and I always feared getting sick. Every horrible thing that I could imagine, I thought that about cancer," she said. "I said that the biggest fear in anything that could come my way, my biggest fear was getting cancer. And here I was; I got cancer."
