When Hope Needs Hope

Joan Garrett McClane: Before the cancer, there was Christmastime.

There was convincing her curly-headed 7-year-old son for one more year that Santa Claus existed. There was Amazon shopping for her husband, Terry Cannon, and hopes of sledding on the pillowy white hills if it snowed.

And there was her work, her hospice, the hospice she dreamed to open and almost didn't. There was the nice new sign outside her office building on Rossville Avenue and the excited staff. There was the sense that at age 43 she had finally — after years of toil and worry — arrived.

Deanna Duncan hadn't planned to have her breasts flattened and analyzed that day. But the doctor she was meeting with about hospice…