Our Story
(written by Melissa)

Mike and I met when I was 16 and he was 17. I worked as a lifeguard at the pool in Catasauqua, PA (his hometown, also known as “Catty” to many of you) and we met through mutual friends. Needless to say, he became my best friend. We spent every day together and even though I knew that he liked me, I was moving from PA to FL for college and didn’t want a relationship. Well, he was the first person to call me at school and our friendship only grew stronger with distance. We started dating in January 2002. It was the middle of my freshman year at the University of Tampa and the middle of his sophomore year at Penn State.

We dated long distance for 2 ½ years and during my senior year of college he moved to Tampa to be with me (he graduated a year ahead of me). After I finished college, we both had dreams of going to grad school and “the stars aligned” to allow us go to school in the same city (me at the University of Pittsburgh to get my Master’s degree in Genetic Counseling and him at Duquesne University School of Law). We knew that we wanted to get married, but wanted to wait to graduate, so that we would hopefully be able to pay for the wedding of our dreams.

Luckily, I was able to find a job as a genetic counselor at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa in June of 2008. Mike and I made the move back to FL and he spent every night for months studying for the FL Bar exam. He passed with flying colors (!!!) and we hoped to get engaged…as soon as he got a job. Given the bad economy it took him until February 2009 to find a job and life finally seemed to be going our way. Until March that is…March 9, 2009 was the worst day of my life. I was diagnosed with stage III invasive breast cancer…at age 25. I work in cancer genetics and often see young patients with strong family histories of cancer, but I had only ever counseled one patient younger than me and I have NO family history of cancer. It was the one thing that I was never worried about getting. I know that God has a plan for me. I am lucky to work at a comprehensive cancer center and am getting the best of care, but that care includes chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Even then, there are no guarantees. Mike has been my greatest supporter and right before I lost my hair he proposed (by this point we had been dating 7 ½ years).