To Love, Honor & Cherish

This is a story of two people in love faced with almost insurmountable life challenges. She is a nurse stricken with breast cancer. . . . he is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon mourning the loss of his wife and son . . . .

They each had traveled life=s path until, in the midst of tragedy and despair, they found each other and their love. From the beginning, there was a magnetism between them. He felt it and admitted it. She felt it and denied it. Then, within three years of each other, her husband and his wife passed away. She believed it was destiny, their destiny.

But fate interferes. Her cancer returns and she feels hopeless and helpless. He wants to marry, but she doesn’t know if she will live or die. She wants to set him free; to give him a chance to meet someone else. In desperation, she flees.

Would she have gotten involved with him, she wonders, if she knew this was the way it would end? She remembered standing in front of the mirror taking stock of herself. She remembered running her hands down over her body wondering: Would he know? If he touched her, could he tell which breast was fake, which was real? She remembered the little voice crying out inside of her to cancel that first date. Should she have listened? No. There was no resisting his magnetism. She was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

He finds her and brings her back home but then suffers a near-fatal brain injury in a boating accident. And so, Andrea’s life is turned upside down once again.

Alone and lonely, Andrea begins the long, arduous journey through the maze of emotional and physical upheavals she must face. Forced to follow life=s bumpy road, she learns the true meaning of love.

Anastacia is not a writer by her own estimation. She doesn't earn her living by writing. The story came to her in a dream in June of 2007. She dreamt highlights of the story from beginning to end about a city she has never been to, and a lake she has never seen. When she woke, the story so impressed her, she felt compelled to write it.

She had all of the main scenes so all she had to do was "connect the dots" so to speak. She drew upon her own experiences, both personal and medical to do this.

Shortly after beginning the story, she felt the need to get a medical checkup-since the protagonist in the story is a nurse who is diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. In July of 2007, one month after her dream, she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. She underwent a total mastectomy and reconstruction in 2007 - 19 years after the first occurrence. So, in essence, the dream saved her life.

She believes God had a plan when He blessed her with this dream and the words and ability to put it on paper. And when she went to church after being diagnosed and heard the words of inspiration by Dr. Kenneth Harper, Pastor of Green Valley Presbyterian Church, she realized God's plan was not only to save her life, but to encourage other women to be vigilant in guarding their health, and to send a message of hope to women everywhere stricken with this dreadful, disfiguring, and deadly disease. Throughout the long journey toward recovery, she continued to work on her book, and many of the medical procedures she endured are graphically detailed in order to focus on what a woman goes through to save her life. Through the story, she hopes to impart insight to health-care professionals, husbands, lovers, relatives and friends, as to the enormous emotional turmoil a woman suffers through this horrific ordeal, and through enlightenment, she hopes they will be better able to offer the patience and support so desperately needed.