Before the jack-o-lanterns are mashed into pumpkin pies and the fake cobwebs are swept away, Limestone County native Brenda Owens, 69, will already be putting up her Christmas trees. She used to decorate 14, but pain from her cancer treatments has made her scale back to only four this year. Her favorite is a pink tree decked out with all her breast cancer prevention ornaments. It reminds her to fight.

The mother and grandmother has a lot to fight for, including the chance to spend time with the three grandchildren she calls “the lights of her life.”

Her struggle with breast cancer began in November of 2011, two years after her husband died of Alzheimer’s disease.

Owens was faithful to do self breast examinations and always got her yearly mammogram. Because she had followed all of the breast cancer prevention recommendations and didn’t have a family history of breast cancer, she didn’t suspect a mass was growing inside her left breast until she woke up with a little blood on her nightgown. Thinking she had scratched herself in the middle of the night, she brushed it off until it happened again the next morning. To her surprise, she traced it back to a bloody discharge coming from her left nipple.

She consulted with her family doctor, who immediately sent her to Valley Imaging in Huntsville for a mammogram, which again was negative. Her radiologist, Dr. Joseph Cannon, didn’t buy it and sent her to a surgeon who biopsied her breast and found that she had ductal carcinoma in situ, a highly treatable, non-invasive cancer.

After she had her left breast removed, doctors did not require her to undergo radiation or chemotherapy because the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes. Her doctors assured Owens that the type of cancer she had only had a 7 percent chance of recurring, but she had her right breast removed a year later as a preventative measure.

“I was fine for two years,” Owens said. “But I started hurting real back in my back so I told my oncologist.”

In August 2013, a spinal biopsy revealed that Owens’ cancer had indeed returned. It had also spread to two parts of her spine and the bones of her ribs.

“When some people hear the word ‘cancer,’ they throw their hands up in defeat,” Owens said. “But I have too much to live for to stop fighting. Some people ask, ‘Why me?’ I ask, ‘Why not me?’”

“I am a walking miracle. I have survived two heart attacks, renal failure, blood poisoning and now this,” she added. “I survived them all, God has a reason for keeping me around. I hope and I pray and I keep on kicking.”

Owens submits herself to the painful treatments that keep her bone cancer from spreading so she can keep cooking homemade chicken and dumplings and sugar cookies for her grandkids. Trey is the oldest at 20, while Scarlett is 19. They’re both students at the University of North Alabama. Her youngest grandchild, Lucas, is 15 and a sophomore at Tanner High School.

“Once a month, I have to go to the cancer center and get a chemo shot that is absolutely horrible,” she explained. “They use two different needles and inject it into the muscle of the hip. It is like Karo syrup and takes forever to get in there.”

For the two weeks following treatment, Owens struggles with nausea, vomiting and crippling bone pain. But visits and calls from her grandchildren, son Trevor Owens and daughter Sabrina Bates keeps her going, as does the faithful prayer support of her friends and church family at Oakland Church of Christ.