This is the last in the series "Peg's Legs," three articles chronicling the lives of breast cancer survivors. The second in the series ran in our Winter 2004 issue. The first appeared in Fall 2003. Both are archived under "Our back pages.".

Cyndi Levine is sitting in the back of a van traveling down a gravel logging road somewhere between the towns of St. Helens and Mist in the Oregon Coast range. Her hair is pulled back. Her thin face is lined and taut. She checks her watch. It is 4 a.m. She hasn't slept in 22 hours.

In western Oregon, the cloud cover occasionally lifts to reveal shooting stars racing across the night sky. They appear in August in the vicinity of Perseids as if an archer emptied his quiver to illuminate the summer night. It is illusion. These are not stars, and they do not come from Perseids. They are meteors, fragmentary markers of a little known comet the astronomers have labeled 1862 III. The comet remains a shadow, closer to the earth than Perseids, but hidden from view.

Cyndi stumbles out of the van, her short legs just missing the running board. At another time she might make a joke about it, but not now. She grabs a reflective vest from the back of the van and places it over her head, notching it securely at the waist. She takes a last drink of water and reaches for her flashlight. Cyndi tries to stretch the kinks from her sleep-deprived body to prepare for her leg of the race. It's the 200-mile Hood-to-Coast Relay. Cyndi is part of a 12-woman team of breast cancer survivors, the team called Peg's Legs. It's her turn now, at 4 a.m. to run five miles.

Six months ago, Cyndi found a lump in her breast. Another lump. She had already met and defeated cancer once and was past the five year mark when many doctors consider their patients to be cancer-free. She had no family history. She thought she was safe.

As she waits by the side of the road for her teammate, Carol, to run by and pass the relay bracelet to her, her mind races: Peggy is having a recurrence. I'm having a recurrence. I run. I eat right. Isn't that what it says to do in the newspapers? Bullshit! It is hard for her to accept that all the lifestyle changes don't insulate her or her teammates from the cancer's reappearance.

It is the unseen comet that races across the night sky. On a single August night, fifty "stars" per hour flame out in a hushed thrill. There is no sound to accompany this light show. Without a skyward glance, one could miss the whole thing.

A mammogram is a cloudy image of gray fatty tissue and milky white breast tissue. Sometimes the film reveals a sprinkling of bright white specks called micro calcifications. For eight women in ten the calcifications are signs of normal aging. Calcium from bone erodes over time, moving without notice to other places in the body. It is when the calcium particles form a cluster in one breast that a radiologist takes note. For two women in ten it is the marker of an unseen tumor. The cluster of calcifications held within the tumor's orbit is often the only visible sign of its existence.

When Cyndi was first diagnosed in 1992, she was thirty-nine and considered too young for routine mammography. The procedure was not recommended by the American Cancer Society until a woman reached forty and was accepted practice only for women between the ages of fifty and sixty-nine. Cyndi felt a lump, about the size of a pea, and went to see her gynecologist.

The meteors are only particles really, most no larger than a pea, but their beauty belies their destructive power. The meteoric fragments caught by the earth's gravity descend at speeds of ten to fifty miles a second. At fifty miles high, they are "shooting stars." Closer to earth, the minute fragments, now the size of a pin prick, have the destructive capability of a .22 caliber bullet.

The mammogram that followed her physical exam disclosed a ductal carcinoma in situ - a very early, not-yet-invasive cancer -- but it did not reveal the more serious lobular infiltrative tumor. It was hiding in her dense, young breast tissue. No calcifications had been gathered into its orbit. This cancer was sending microscopic messengers that could later show up as disease in her breast and at other places in her body. A slow-growing variety of cancer with a deadly aim.

Slow or fast, in situ, invasive or infiltrative, whatever the specific variety, more than seven hundred women heard the same news on the same day Cyndi did. More than seven hundred American women hear that news every day. They leave their doctor's office to pick up the kids at school knowing that their priorities are now a step removed from their children. They return to work focused on a different time line than their coworkers. They tell their partners and wonder if their relationship will ever be the same.