For Linda and Jim Bost, their family — not Linda’s cancer — is the focal point of their lives. “Everyone has a choice in life, and my choice is to laugh,” Linda says. “I have bad days. I embrace those days and move on.”

Linda Bost hands over a handwritten page from a legal pad, a matter-of-fact chronicle of her experience with cancer. The first line of the document puts the rest of what’s written in perspective:

“Cancer is what I have, it is not who I am.”

Cancel the pity party. Put away the violins. This is a good life, and Bost isn’t about to yield to a diagnosis that has been quite a bit more than a nuisance since 2003. That year, several times, sudden and extraordinary pain caused Bost to double over. “It was hard to pinpoint the cause,” she says. “First they thought my gallbladder had gone wonky. Then they thought I might have Crohn’s.” Finally a CT scan revealed the culprit: a rare carcinoid tumor in her small bowel.

Surgery was scheduled immediately and afterward Bost was cancer-free for 10 years.

Lawrence resident Linda Bost has a mantra. It goes like this: “Cancer is what I have, it is not who I am.”

Then, in 2013, Bost and her husband, Jim, were getting ready to leave on a road trip to Texas. Bost says she was feeling more and more unwell. Recent checkups had shown certain cancer markers were rising. It was no surprise that Lawrence Memorial Hospital oncologist Dr. Sherri Soule told them during an office visit that the cancer had returned. The couple went ahead with their trip.

“We had always known that there would be no surgery and no ‘magic pill’ if the cancer returned,” Bost says. “Doctors had told us that from the beginning.” Now the results of the tests were clear. The cancer had metastasized.

In July of that year, a second malignancy was discovered in Bost’s breast, a cancer unrelated to the first. Bost went through a lumpectomy and six-and-a-half weeks of radiation. She continues oral medication. This episode, which Bost describes as “a dip in the road,” would have been really scary, she says, if she didn’t already have cancer.

But now, with that interloper whipped, Bost can return her attention to what matters. And here’s a hint what commands most of her attention: It’s not an “it,” and it’s certainly not a disease.

It’s family. She and Jim have two sons, Paul and Derek, both in the plumbing business, just like their dad had been. Megan Bost, Paul’s wife, works in the LMH surgery department. Their kindergarten-aged son, Henry, is a priority on Linda Bost’s list.

Bost agreed to tell her story because, she says, “I would not tell the people at LMH no for anything. They are there for so many people. They are funny and enjoyable and they treat people with respect and honor and laughter. These people are the ones I see as heroes.”

A turning point in her thinking about her cancer came after the breast cancer diagnosis, when the numbers for her carcinoid tumors were also at a bad point. “I was so exhausted. I was just done,” she says. Her pastor, Matt Zimmerman of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, was talking about the scripture in which the woman who had suffered bleeding for many years touched Jesus’ cloak. Even though Christ was in a crowd of people, he felt the woman’s touch and he knew she had received healing.

The way Zimmermann told the story had a deep effect on Bost. “It didn’t heal me physically, but it did heal me spiritually. From that moment on, I haven’t had that chaos in my head. Until then, nothing in my world was in control,” she says.

“I have learned to budget my energy and pick what’s important,” Bost adds. Grandson Henry always makes the priority list.

Toward the end of summer, an out-of-control mess of perennials and weeds off her back deck was driving Bost crazy.

“For days,” she recalls, “I sat on the deck and cried because I couldn’t do anything about the mess. I didn’t have the strength or stamina to get out there and clean it up.

“Then I had the idea to reclaim the space as something new. I had Jim just mow it all down. We started over. Now the garden is simpler, with a few trees and shrubs. In the middle is a sculpture of a blue heron, with a big fish in his mouth.

“Cancer can take my body, but it can’t take me, and I refuse to let it,” Bost says. “Everyone has a choice in life, and my choice is to laugh. I have bad days. I embrace those days and move on.”