Stover family receives outpouring of support during cancer battle

For a healthy, non-smoking 40-year-old woman going in for a routine examination of a congenital mass, a lung cancer diagnosis with no symptoms is almost unheard of, but that’s exactly the news that Stacey Stover received in January. With the support of her family and the BCLUW communities, she is making a full recovery, and Stover and her husband Kurt spoke to The Grundy Register about why they’re so lucky to live in a rural area during a time like this.
 
“Still to this day, it doesn’t seem real,” Stacey said.
 
The news hasn’t all been bad, however: Stover had surgery to remove the cancerous mass on January 13, and her lymph nodes have healed on their own, meaning she won’t need to undergo chemotherapy for her adenocarcinoma. She’s now seeing a lung specialist, a surgeon and an oncologist in Ames at Mary Greeley Hospital on a regular basis, and she’ll probably be getting x-rays and CT scans for the rest of her life.
 
Stacey and her husband Kurt have three children—Lincoln, Kalia and Maysa—all under the age of 12, and as one can imagine, addressing the issue with them was daunting. They were afraid for their mother, and they cried.
 
“It was kind of hard at first to talk to them at first, and their response was difficult,” Stacey said. “But once they found out I didn’t have to have treatment, they were happy about it.”
 
Read more in this week's Grundy Register.