Deborah Hampton has been battling cancer for 15 years, to the point that it has become a way of life.
“I have to chase this thing,” she said on a recent afternoon in her Hixson home. “It’s always nipping at my heels, and I just have to turn around toward it and chase it.”
Mrs. Hampton was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994 at the age of 42 during a trip to Costa Rica. After having a double mastectomy and chemotherapy, she discovered that her fight against the disease was going to be a lot tougher.
“I went after it pretty fiercely initially, I just wanted to live long enough to raise my daughter,” who was 10 at that time, she said. “I had expected that all would go well, that’s part of the irony, statistically it looked like I would do just fine.”
Six years later, she had a recurrence, and that time it was a lot worse.