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March Friend to Friend survivor

Story by Sophia Spencer

8:47 p.m. Wednesday, March 5, 2008

This month in our Friend to Friend report, a reason to trust your gut instinct.

Our March survivor's path with breast cancer started almost five years ago.

Doctors told her a cyst was nothing to worry about. But her own instincts chimed in, fortunately before it was too late.

Angie Wessel still has the wig she wore to her son's wedding. She'd just started chemotherapy. Now almost three years later, sometimes she'd like to put it back on.

" I tell people now this is my chemo perm," Angie said. "It used to be wavy and this is a very tight curl that won't go away. It's what I have now."

Make no mistake, Angie knows she's lucky. For two years, a doctor told her a cyst in her breast wasn't cancer.

"He thought I was too young to have cancer," she said.

But the doctor was wrong. Acting on her own intuition she got the cyst biopsied and found out she had stage 2 cancer.

"Two years is a long time to watch it. I would tell people never to do that ever," Angie said.

Angie made the most of her situation and matched her outfits to a variety of scarves and hats she collected. At the time she was a student at Emporia State. The students there loved her attitude and sense of style and gave her a lot of support. One even made her a pink blanket.

"The expense and she said her grandmother helped her, it meant a lot to me..," she said.

She got her degree and is teaching every day now and enjoying a life she doesn't take for granted.

"I know the cancer can come back and that's always in the back of my mind."