​On August 8, 2018,  LouAnn Rodgers got the shock of her life. It’s the day she went to her doctor’s office for her regular screening and found out she had breast cancer.

“It was fear. I mean fear. And when I was talking to my doctor, Dr. Scott, he said, okay, this is not a death sentence, you know? And I think that is what I was really thinking. Oh, I’m going to die. I was really devastated,” she said.

She started treatment the following month.

“It took about maybe 2 or 3 months. I cried every treatment,” LouAnn recalls.

She says she closed herself off to everyone, including her family and friends.

“I felt more or less I would say, embarrassed. Because I do my screenings every year. And I guess I thought that this is not supposed to happen to me. But it did,” she said.

LouAnn told Cherish Lombard that she has always been a strong, independent person and she didn’t want anyone to look at her as anything less.

She said, “Like I told my family, when I did tell them about it, I told them don’t feel sorry for me because I am good.”

But she says losing her hair really got her down.

“The hardest part was the loss of my hair. Because you know a woman loves her hair. That was hard. Nobody knew. I kept my feelings to myself,” she remembers.

She picked herself back up, and pushed through, and decided to open up to her family. She says that was the best thing she did.

“Ladies, especially, please, don’t shut your family out and get your screenings every year. Please get your screenings,” Rodgers said.

LouAnn found out she’s cancer-free on February 14th. She says she’s always wanted to help others, and through her chemotherapy sessions, she found a way to do that.
“I fix up 20 chemo goodie bags every three weeks I go to treatment and pass them out to the people and they love it,” she said.

She calls it, “Lou’s gift of love.” She’s also getting back to the things she loves most about life, like shopping, trips to the beach with her family, spending time with her husband, who’s been with her every step of the way, and taking her 8-year-old grandson to the park.

She encourages everyone facing a breast cancer diagnosis to stay positive even when it gets really tough, because she says, it will.

She said, “I never laid in bed because I didn’t feel good. I got up. I’m not a quitter. I have to keep going. I have to move forward. Whatever you do, don’t give up.”

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