As one of three friends who are cancer survivors, Glenda Standeven of Chilliwack is one of the three authors of a combined memoir called Choosing to Smile (2010 $26.95). She was born in Vancouver on August 18, 1955.

Julie Houlker has faced breast cancer three times. She is one of the few women who have had a mastectomy twice on the same side - a natural breast and a reconstructed breast removed -- and was facing metastatic breast cancer when the book was published in 2010.

Glenda Standeven, first diagnosed with cancer in 1987, was a young mother of a three-year-old boy when she lost her entire right leg, hip and pelvis to bone cancer in 1988. Within three years of her surgery she gave birth to her second son despite having only half a pelvis.

Michelle Rickaby was diagnosed in 1988 with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had two infant daughters when she was diagnosed with the same disease that had claimed her brother's life five years earlier. She also lost her mother and step-mother to breast cancer after her own diagnosis.

[2010]