As the president of a successful civil engineering, land surveying, and land planning firm, Frederick A. Hesketh was a professional who had everything, including a wife of thirty-three years who had survived her own bout with cancer eight years earlier, and five mature children whose flight from the nest had left an opportunity for travel and new experiences. the tranquility of the empty next was shattered, as if by a hurricane, when Fred was diagnosed with an invasive bladder cancer in June of 1992.

This book is not about shattered nests, shattered dreams and disease. This boook is about life, faith, and hope. It describes a patient's battle to gain control of his life, his mind, and his body and to cope with the new demands of being a patient while applying an engineer's logic to research of alternate treatments and the relationship between the care givers and care receivers, where one is merely doing their job and the other is fighting for control of their destiny.

It is a story about a husband and wife and their five children as well as the growing number of grandchildren who together faced a threatening illness not once, but twice, and found strength and courage in each other in the face of tragedy.