How we met and fell in love 

Tawanna: I was divorced, and my daughter said that I needed to get a life. So she signed me up on PlentyOfFish.com. Barry reached out to me and said, “Let’s talk.” He stood me up the first night. So we talked for a couple of weeks, and then one night in January, it was snowing, and we met at a church parking lot. I had pepper spray in my hand, and five months later, we got married in that same church parking lot.  Seventeen years in June.

Two weeks after we met, we were married five months to the day after we met.

I don’t know, it just really clicked. We hit it off from the very beginning. He made me laugh a lot.

Barry: Don’t you know what quality you like about me?

Tawanna: Too many. Too many.

Building a life together in Kentucky

Barry: I had a daughter who was five when her mother passed. I couldn’t ask for a better mother than Tawanna.

Tawanna: I had a 16-year-old who did not like Barry. But we married, and he was starting a real estate career as an agent, and I was actually working at a real estate office. There was no connection between the two. He started selling real estate. I quit that job and started in medical billing. He came and said, “I think we can cover your income if you’ll quit and help me.” And so I quit my job. And we did. We made the income work. Then, a few years later, he decided we would start our own business. So here we are, ten years later, in our own real estate company. My daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, actually likes him better now than she does me. She calls him first. And of course, the five-year-old is now 22 with kids. We’ve been through a lot.

Barry: In 2011, I had an open-heart surgery, a quad bypass.

Tawanna: But we stuck it out. And so we — that’s why we have microphones and the cameras, because of the real estate business. And that’s kind of us in a nutshell.

Barry: And every time we have something happen, many times it would drive families apart. It drove us closer.

Tawanna’s experience of becoming a stepmom after loss

Tawanna: I actually joked that I fell in love with Barry’s daughter, and I married him to get her. I loved her from the first time I met her, and people thought we looked alike. We would go out, and they would say, “You look just like your mom.” And she’d say, “I feel like I’m lying, but I don’t want to tell them.” And it was just a very good relationship up until the teenage years, when things got very difficult.

But I mean, I wasn’t able to have more children than just the one, so I thought that was just God’s way of giving me something that I thought I couldn’t have. And we always really strived to make sure that she never forgot her mother. There were always pictures in her room of her mother, always reminding her of her mother and her mother’s birthday, so that she wouldn’t forget her mother, because I wasn’t the stepmother. We never went with those words. But I never wanted her to forget her mother. 

Barry: It’s hard to put into words. The life we built was different than the life I’d had in the past, for various reasons and various complications and stuff. We’ve built a much stronger life on faith and trust in God. That was, I think, our foundation now more than ever. 

Becoming grandparents

Tawanna: It’s kind of an unusual story. He actually has an older daughter. I think she was 19 when we married, so she had already moved out. Her name is actually the same as my daughter’s name, so we have two Ambers. So she has the boys, and they are living right now in New York, but they were in California, so we don’t see them very often. And then our daughter, whom I raised, is about an hour away, and she has the two little girls, and one is just a few months old.

Barry: There’s nothing like it.

Tawanna: It’s the most amazing thing in the world. I wish I could have done it all my life. They are just wonderful. And, actually, the boys, when we first got to meet them, they called me White Grandma. Most people think it’s because they are mixed race, but it’s because at the time, I had blond hair, and no one in their family had blond hair. So they still call me White Grandma.

So I said, “Let me talk to Barry.” And I said, “Do you think God is saying, ‘No, don’t do this’?” And he said, “I don’t think He closed the door. I think He caused a bump.” 

So I did the biopsy, fully thinking, “I’m good.” I told the ladies when they were putting me to sleep, “I’m going to give a kidney. This is what I’m doing.” So they came in after the biopsy, and they said, “You’re going to give a kidney. We don’t see a problem. We think you’re good, but we need to get results.”

About a week later, I got the results in my MyChart and in my email, which were that it was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (follicular lymphoma). So that knocked me out of the donation. I was no longer able to donate to Sera. I never had any symptoms. I never had any idea. I would have never known that it was there had I not gone for the donation testing.

So Sera, at the time, said, “You know, you were trying to save my life, but I’ve saved yours.” She did. So that’s how I found out that I had cancer.

Barry: She has always put everybody else first, and this was an ultimate gift. As I said, she loves Sera. They were as thick as thieves. Anytime she was here, they were pushing up and down the hall in cardboard boxes and playing. It was very special. Our Tanya, the grandmother, was the very first agent we hired when we opened our office. So it’s always been a close, close relationship, but Tawanna always puts everybody else first. Always has, since I met her. That’s just who she is. And that’s the ultimate gift — to give a part of you to somebody. And when she couldn’t do it, it was still saving her life. So God has a funny way of working things out. 

Tawanna: Sera did get a kidney. Once I couldn’t, they put out a call because she was running out of time. And a 19-year-old boy in her town was able to donate to her. She is a year and a half out, and she couldn’t be doing any better. She’s grown so much. She’s so beautiful. And she’s doing a lot now with the Children’s Miracle Network and the UK Hospital to promote kidney donation.

So He took care of her, because I was more devastated that I could not give her the kidney than I was that I had cancer. I wanted to do it so badly, but she got better than I was going to be able to provide for her.

Learning it’s treatable and starting watch and wait

Tawanna: I think by the time we got there — I had had the PET scan and I had seen the results of the PET scan — by that time I had really educated myself on what this cancer was. But I wanted to hear him say, “We can take care of this. While it’s not curable, it’s extremely treatable.” 

He went through a lot of what my future was going to look like. So when I left there, I remember we went to a Mexican restaurant, and we celebrated because it was such a weight lifted that they can treat it. Even though watch and wait is very scary and very mentally draining sometimes, he made me feel very comfortable. I think he answered both of our questions.

Barry: A lot of questions. He broke it down very simply and was in no rush. He talked to us as long as we wanted to talk, and it was very comfortable, just like we’re talking now. He was very personable. And he takes it personally. He has a lot of empathy for what he does. He’s great.

Tawanna: He made me very comfortable with the fact that he wanted me to live my life. “I’ll worry about it. I don’t want you to worry about it. You go on, live your life. I’ll take care of this.” And I felt very good when I left. That doesn’t mean that there are days when I don’t fall apart or get nervous. When it’s time for a scan, I struggle, but I have a very good team. 

Learning about follicular lymphoma

Barry: I’d heard of it, yes, but didn’t understand what it was. The kinds of cancer we typically hear about are breast cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer. That’s the three biggest ones that you typically hear around here, I think. Is that right? Non-Hodgkin’s — you hear it, but it doesn’t register because you’ve not been there. You know, people now have had it for 15, 20 years.

Some people that we know had it, which we didn’t know about. A friend of mine from Northern Kentucky, who is also in the real estate business, saw our post, and he called. We’d been to class together, through training together. I didn’t know he’d had cancer, and I think he’s a 14- or 15-year survivor now.

Tawanna: There were actually two people in our church who, when I was diagnosed, came to me and said, “I have that too.” I had no idea. I had heard the word, but I didn’t know what it was, and I did not know that it didn’t always require treatment. So it’s been a lot of learning. 

Living with the mental side of watch and wait

Tawanna: I pray a lot. I lean on God a lot, because I can get a stomach virus, and I think it’s spread to my stomach. That’s where my mind starts going. Or if my hip hurts, “What if it’s getting in my bone marrow? What if it’s growing?”

But I have to take myself back to, you know, if God hadn’t laid it on my heart to donate that kidney, I wouldn’t even know I had it. He’s taken care of me this far. He’s going to take care of me. He’s given me the best support group that, if I had to choose to give up that support group or be cancer-free, I don’t want to be cancer-free if I have to give up this support group because they are amazing. 

My church family and friends have knocked stuff off my bucket list for me in case I do have to start treatment, because at one point, I was going to have to start treatment. He said, “When you come back, if it’s growing, we’re going to have to start treatment.” I went through the whole process of finding wigs and preparing, and my scan showed that it actually shrank a little bit, which is possible. It can come up and down, and I didn’t have to have treatment.

But it’s a roller coaster. Some days are hard. Some days I struggle with it in my head, and I’ve got to try to get out of my head and think, “You’re okay. They’re watching this, and you’re okay.”

I’ve actually been bumped out now that I can go a year without a scan, as long as my bloodwork is good. I know that one day it’s possible that I could have to have treatment, but I try not to think about that. I just try to put it in the back of my mind, because he did tell me that he has lost more patients to other things than he has lost to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, such as COVID or those types of things.

I try to just live my life as normally as I can. My immune system is compromised. My lymph nodes — my body is fighting the cancer to keep it from growing, so I don’t want it to fight a sinus infection right now. So there are times I wear a mask. If we travel, I’ll wear a mask and try to keep from catching anything. But I try not to think about it every day.

Of course, in the beginning, it was hard. I tried to be strong and say, “I’m okay,” until I decided, you know, I’m not okay. I took about a week, and I cried. I cried, I slept, I cried. And at the end of that week, I said, “You’ve got to pick yourself up now. You’ve felt sorry for yourself. Now it’s time to get up and fight.” But there’s a grieving process. I’m sure you know. You have to grieve what life you thought you had, because my life was never going to look the same.

But it doesn’t mean I can’t have a good life. I’ve had more fun since I’ve had my cancer diagnosis than I had the entire first part of my life because — you’ve only got a short time to go, so you may as well fit everything in now. So it’s not all bad. There are blessings in that. You can find a silver lining in there.

How we communicate about the hard days

Tawanna: Most of the time, I try to handle it and not tell him. But we work together. We’re always together, and he’ll always call when I’m crying — always. And I’ll just say, “I’m having a bad day. I’m just having a bad day.” There are fewer bad days than there used to be. But sometimes I just need to feel it. Sometimes you just gotta feel it. Feel the scare. Because I don’t want to ignore that, because then it’s going to build up.

He’ll just say, “What can I do?” I think he’s pretty good at picking up on when I’m having a bad day. But I think I’m pretty good at telling him.

Barry: She thinks she is. Yes, I have to agree with that. She thinks she is. She probably doesn’t tell me nearly as much as it happens, if I were guessing. And probably when I do call, it’s been a bad day. I pick up on it, obviously, because she’s been crying. But there are probably times that she doesn’t mention it, if she’s being truthful.

Tawanna: I think for the most part I do pretty well. Close to scans — PET scans are the worst. The first PET scan was the absolute worst because I had that fear. I had not met with the doctor yet, and I literally — my body shook — for two days. I just sat and shook. I couldn’t eat. I was just an absolute mess.

The second PET scan, I was very nervous and tried not to cry. I got in the machine, and you’re there, it seems like, for so long. I just said, “Lord, please ease my anxiety and calm my nerves.” About that time, the machine kicked off, and I had fallen asleep, and I had slept through the entire thing.

They said, “You’re done.” And I said, “I just got in there.” And they said, “No, you’ve been asleep.” Oh.

So I do very well most days. I have the most trouble closest to scans. There are days I look in the mirror, and I see this lump, and I think, “Oh, it’s bigger,” and I’ll have to come to Barry and say, “Do you think it looks bigger?” And he’ll say, “Let’s look at the picture,” because we took a picture of it in the beginning. He’ll say, “I don’t think it’s any bigger,” and talk me down. But the longer I go, the easier it gets.

Barry: The toughest times are the two weeks leading up to the scan and the week following till it shows up in MyChart, which I think should be against the law. Until you talk to your physician, results should not be in there because it creates so much anxiety each time.

Tawanna: I mean, if it’s not in simple terms, you can read it wrong. The first time I had diagnosed myself on the very first one. I really diagnosed myself completely wrong, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was. But you know, when it comes in MyChart, who’s not going to look, you know?

But I think I do pretty well until the scan times. I try not to think about it, and I try to laugh about it a lot. I joke about it a lot. I’ll tell Barry sometimes at night that, “My lymph nodes are wanting some ice cream,” or if I want something, I’ll say, “But Barry, I have cancer,” or I’ll use it. I asked the psychologist if I could use it to get out of a speeding ticket. Which has worked.

This morning in our meeting, I told them, “You need to learn to do some of these things for yourself, because we all know I’m a ticking time bomb.” I try to have a good sense of humor about it, and I think it helps a lot to lighten a very serious thing. 

Feeling prepared for future watch and wait phases

Tawanna: I have accepted it. I think he’s accepted it. It’s different from the experience he’s had in the past, and that was something that really bothered me: he’s been through this already, and here I am going to put him through it again. But it is different.

Life is just as normal as it can be. I’m not thinking about it every day. I’m not having to deal with it every day. I try not to. We do have the opportunity to do things — as my bucket list — to get things done, to do all those things I wanted to do, in case in the future I do have to go through treatment, or if, God forbid, it doesn’t go as planned. I can have all that taken care of. I can plan, and I think we have a very good understanding of it.

How this experience differs from Barry’s first wife’s cancer journey

Barry: There’s no comparison. When we found out, after she had the craniotomy, we went from having a normal life to where we, for the most part, lived in Hope Lodge for seven or eight months. We’d come home for a couple of days, then go right back. She was having chemo and radiation at the same time, so the quality of life — there wasn’t any.

We stayed at Hope Lodge. We’d drive to the treatment, we’d do chemo, go downstairs, and do radiation. Some days it was both of them. Some days it was one or the other. But we didn’t really have a life once we got that diagnosis. We lived out of a suitcase.

Hope Lodge is a great place if you need it. But it takes a toll, because everyone around you — it’s a support system, but at the same time, everybody there is fighting the same fight from various levels. There’s really no comparison because this is just totally different.

The part that helped me was the verbiage. What to look for. What to be ready for. The questions to kind of ask. And preparation that way.

The hardest part for Barry: Hearing “cancer” again

Barry: Hearing it for the first time. That was by far the hardest for me. But once we heard it, we knew what the plan was, and we bounced back pretty quickly.

Tawanna: There has been some guilt. I do feel guilty. I do worry that I’ll be a burden, which I never want to be. I do feel guilty that he has to go through it. But I hope the good outweighs the bad. He doesn’t have a choice now.

I don’t want to be a burden. That’s probably my biggest fear. I really did feel a lot of guilt for him having to go through it again. But this time is different.

There’s no reason to feel guilty. It’s all part of the master plan. We don’t know what the next chapter is. We just take one chapter at a time. This is the chapter we’re in now.

How cancer changed Tawanna 

Tawanna: I was very introverted. I did not like to get out around people. I did not hug people. I was not going to hug anyone. I hug a lot now. I try to share more. I’m a lot more extroverted now than I’ve ever been, I think.

And my faith has really grown because I need that. I was devastated that I couldn’t donate the kidney. I was upset because I thought that was the plan. But then I came to realize that His plan was for me to find out that I have cancer, and He took care of Sera anyway.

It’s made me more open to talking to people about things and more empathetic. I used to, at church, when they would say, “Welcome and greet your neighbor,” if I could go to the bathroom while they were doing that, that’s what I would do. But now I am hugging and talking to people. It’s important to connect with people now, because I needed people when I found out. I needed people; I needed them to surround me, and I want to do that for others.