Sarina Geist says her daughter, Georgia, encouraged her during her battle against breast cancer. Georgia participated in a Lawrence Memorial Hospital program for children who have a family member undergoing cancer treatment.

Sarina Geist is used to doing what needs to be done. As a single mom she not only brings home the bacon, she fries it up and washes the pan.

“But the cancer diagnosis blindsided me,” she says. “Coping with that, continuing to work, and going through the treatment was a new level of doing what I had to do. I remember walking down the hallway at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, reading the stories of survivors. One of them was about a woman diagnosed with cancer while pregnant with twins.”

“Wow,” Geist says she thought. “At least I’m not pregnant with twins.”

She found inspiration in that hallway.

Sarina Geist, who is manager of the video store at Liberty Hall, has advice for people on the journey through cancer treatment: “You can get to the other side of this.”

“I knew I had to get through to the other side of this situation. I knew I had to push through. I learned to ask for help and, sometimes, I waved the white flag.”

Geist manages the video store at Liberty Hall, 646 Massachusetts St., and had been in that job about two years when one morning while getting dressed she happened to brush against a lump on her breast. She knew immediately it needed to be examined. The nurse practitioner she saw suggested she watch it a month. A month later, there was no change.

Geist went to Health Care Access and was immediately referred to LMH South for a mammogram, which was provided through a Kansas Department of Health program, Early Detection Works. After the mammogram confirmed a mass in her breast, she underwent a biopsy.

Three days later, at age 32, with no family history of breast cancer, Geist was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.

“I remember making a decision to just suck it up and do what I needed to do,” Geist says.

She began chemotherapy in late August 2013. The tumor responded well to treatment and, by the end of the year, she was through with chemo. That New Year’s Eve, Geist was so wrung out from the treatment that she could barely move, she says. “But I was sure partying in my head.”

Soon she was ready for the next step in treatment, a lumpectomy. That was followed by 16 weeks of radiation; she finished treatment in April 2014.

The fact that Geist is so young and that she is a single mom without extended family made going through such rigorous treatment extremely challenging, but several supports made all the difference.

The most important helper and encourager was Geist’s daughter, Georgia, who’s now 14.

“She’s actually an angel, with a very good head on her shoulders,” Geist says. “She was always very compassionate and caring, but during my treatment she found something inside herself that helped her go way above and beyond in helping me get through this. We worked together, and she made sure I was OK.”

Other supports include a six-week program at LMH for children with family members undergoing cancer treatment.

Named in honor of Michelle Raney — who died in 2006 after battling cancer — CLIMB-ing With Michelle (the acronym stands for “Children’s Lives Include Moments of Bravery”) provides children ages 6 to 11 with a wide range of emotional help and age-appropriate information, as well as time with peers who are on similar journeys. CLIMB offered Georgia “time to be a kid,” Geist says, and although she was one of the older kids participating at the time, she enjoyed hanging out with the group and doing crafts once a week for a couple of months.

“I’d drop her off and go take a nap,” Geist says.

Geist sometimes needed help with everyday activities, including making meals for herself and Georgia, going to the grocery store and driving to appointments.

“My friends and co-workers all helped. I don’t know what I would do without them,” she recalls.

Geist still attends meetings of the Young Survival Coalition, and she has advice for others starting the journey through cancer treatment.

“You can get to the other side of this. Treatment does end,” she says. “For a while the cancer was all I thought about. I worried every day, but there comes a time when you put it behind you.”

Geist and her daughter are glad to be moving on.

“Georgia’s just doing great,” her mom says. “I don’t know if she’d be the same kid if we hadn’t gone through this. An experience like this has to change you for the better. It’s the only option, really.”