Cancer is a topic that Shea Mobley approaches from more than one perspective. After caring for her son, Samuel, through a yearlong ordeal to treat a rare form of the disease when he was only two years old, the longtime nursing instructor at Wallace State Community College learned that she herself would need treatment for breast cancer — a twofold bout with illness that, at times, reduced her and her family to emotional low points that demanded she leave their fate in the hands of God.
By far, the most profound of those moments came in February of 2018. Parents to three boys, Shea and her then-husband Dennis (Samuel’s father) were late in their small child’s treatment, feeling optimistic after showing up to hear the results from a final scan — a scan that promised to declare their son free from cancer at last.
All that optimism vanished in an instant, though, when Samuel’s scan turned up what appeared to be a potentially devastating new growth.
“It was one of the most pivotal moments; a moment that really changed my whole life,” Mobley said. “Of course we had all been praying; so many people had been praying for us for so long. and I did fully trust in the Lord to take care of these things. But through it all, I had never really given in completely. I was always trying to ‘fix’ everything that I could. Really, I was always kind of pushing myself to fight — as if my actions would be what would change the outcome.
“Well, we go in for that last scan, which is basically supposed to tell us either that all of the cancer is gone; that there’s no evidence of disease — or else it’s going to tell you something worse. We were already kind of celebrating because Samuel had just finished his last chemo [treatment], and then we go in for this scan. and the oncologist walks in with another doctor, and says, ‘There’s something new — a new lesion showing in his scan.’”
Shea’s eyes fill with tears as she allows old emotions — pangs that’ve since given way to far happier times, now that Samuel is a cancer-free nine year-old — to take her back to that most unhappy moment more than six years ago.
“I lost it. I just lost it,” she says. “We had gone through so much at that point. He had gone through so much. We were thinking and hoping and praying that this was all finally about to be over for him. and now they’re walking in and telling us ‘There’s a new lesion?’ People who know me know that I’m not speechless very often. But here, I was speechless. I couldn’t talk about it. We were told he would have to come back in two weeks for a second scan, and after we left that appointment, I hardly spoke for three days straight.
“Once we were back at home and waiting for that next scan — those were the longest two weeks of my life,” Shea continues. “I just felt so defeated.
“One day during that time, I was at home with Samuel by myself, and I was listening to my Bible app on my phone. and that day, they were telling the story of Abraham and Isaac — how Abraham was so trusting that he was willing to give up his son. It’s a story that I’d heard all my life. But this time, it stopped me in my tracks. I’m in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and I just stop and listen and I realize: ‘I haven’t truly given Samuel up — this has got to be in God’s hands.’ So I went in there and picked him up while he was sleeping. and I just held him up and I said, ‘He’s yours — take him,’ and then I just started crying: ‘Take him.’”
It was a moment of handing the reins of control over to a power of unfathomable grace, and for that, says Shea, it was all the more undeniable and real. “I have never felt peace like the peace that I felt in that moment,” she says. “I finally realized that I had truly given him up. All this time I had been holding on, trying to solve this problem by myself — and it was never for me, alone, to solve.”
At her childhood church, Shea and her family gathered for one last prayer meeting before that second fateful scan; a reunion of friends and loved ones who all closed ranks around Samuel and Shea, alongside Dennis and their two older sons Garrett (now 18) and Trenton (now 12).
“It was me ‘leaving him at the altar,’” said Shea. An outward commemoration of the private epiphany that the story of Abraham and Isaac had already elicited back at home. “The whole church came up and laid hands on us; on each other, and they all prayed and prayed and prayed. There were people there I hadn’t seen in years.”
Surrounded once more by his family, Samuel was back for his final MRI the very next day, his parents steeling themselves against a scan result that, only two weeks earlier, had seemed all but unimaginable. and as Shea learned that day, there’s there’s no substitute for understanding the limits of your own control — and for relinquishing everything else to faith.
“They walk into the room and the doctor is looking at me, and said, ‘There’s literally nothing there — there’s nothing in his scan: No lesion. No growth. It’s like nothing was ever there.’ Whew. We had spent almost that whole year thinking and praying and hoping. But it wasn’t until I gave things over to God that I truly had that peace that said, ‘This is going to be okay.’”
As you can probably guess, the emotional energy that Shea invested in her role as a cancer caregiver to her son dwarfs the investment she seems to have made in her own diagnosis, once it was discovered in 2021 — at age 45 — that she had developed cancer in her right breast. Requiring 22 weeks of two different chemotherapy combinations, five weeks of radiation, and ensuing reconstructive surgery, her treatment was unpleasant and extensive. But it didn’t fully interrupt her ability to work — her ability, in fact, to cope with the unknown — in the same way that Samuel’s ordeal, only three years earlier, had done.
One consistent theme running through both of the Mobleys’ very different bouts with cancer is the unwavering support Shea’s family received, through it all, from others. Thanks to her nursing and academic background, Shea already wasn’t one to be deterred from doing deep sleuthing into all the technical and medical mysteries that cancer presented.
“I had a whole binder that was three inches thick!” Shea said of her extensive research into Samuel’s diagnosis of rhabdomyosarcoma (a typically pediatric cancer that develops within muscle tissue). “Right from the start, I wanted to know for myself what we were really up against.”
Her independent (and accurate) detective work paid off in ways both big and small, with Shea navigating an early gauntlet of uncertainty in choosing the right care provider for Samuel; and one that ultimately ended with her audacious decision to reach out to Suzanne Wolden, MD, FACR — one of the most respected radiation oncologists in the United States. As the Director of Pediatric Radiation Oncology for the Kids team at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Wolden agreed that Samuel’s case warranted treatment under her care, though it meant that the Mobley family — in this case, all five of them — would have to travel to the New York area and remain there long enough to consider it their temporary home away from home.
That, says Shea, is where the Mobleys began finding an outpouring of support from places that they never would’ve dared, or perhaps even dreamed, ever to look. It came from places both likely and less so — from colleagues; from Shea’s former nursing students; from members of the community, and, to her surprise, even from fellow New York-area patients she eventually encountered after securing treatment for Samuel’s challenging diagnosis.
“So many people reached out with money; with donations, approaching us from places that you might not even think about,” says Shea. “We had a few people help us out with travel to and from Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and, where we ended up living, during that time, in New Jersey. I had friends and acquaintances donate us their frequent flyer miles, their hotel points, and even to support us through connections with [free patient air transportation outreach] Angel Flight.
“At Wallace State, I had students come out of the woodwork, too: They did T-shirt sales. Well, those T-shirt sales alone literally paid for the house that we rented in New Jersey. Faculty members donated their unused hours of sick time so that I could use them and take that time off for Samuel. and that was done anonymously; you don’t get to know who donated those hours to you. But it ended up being the precise amount that we needed for the time that we spent up there.”
In keeping with the community volunteer spirit of Relay for Life, Mobley says that there’s grace not only in offering help, but in quieting your heart to accept it as well.
“When Samuel was sick, people would ask me: ‘Do you mind if we do this or that to help?’” she said. “Well, there’s something that I learned back then, and I learned it from Dennis’ uncle, who’d been a pastor all his life and has since passed away from leukemia. His name was Doug Reeves. I called him my ‘prayer warrior.’
“Back then, he would come out to cut our grass every week, and when other people would come by and, eventually, started bringing us money … yeah. We really struggled with that. Dennis would say, ‘I really hate to take this money.’ But Uncle Doug gave us some words of wisdom that, I think, really helped us understand how everyone is blessed with a role of their own to play.
“’Don’t deny anybody’s blessing,’ he said. ‘When someone is trying to do something to help you, that’s something that they were led to do. If you don’t allow them to do it, then you are denying them that blessing. Don’t deny them that.’”
At the invitation of Cullman Relay for Life organizer Helen Allen, Shea recently shared her family’s cancer story in front of a local Relay group. Though she’s attended past Cullman Relay events, it was the first time Shea had stood before a crowd of people and related, for others’ benefit, the unique hardships that the Mobleys endured through Samuel’s childhood struggle, as well as her own, with the disease.
“When I went and really told that story for the first time, it was really remarkable to me how different pieces of it would connect with someone else. One lady came up to me afterward with tears in her eyes, telling me specifically how something in my story resonated with her,” says Shea.
“Whether you ever wanted it to be that way or not, cancer does become a part of who you are, and when you’ve dealt with it, you really do become a part of a community. Because of what happened to us, I’ve met and connected with people from all over — from California and New Jersey to right here in Cullman. You’re a part of that ‘community’ because you’re a cancer family; a cancer survivor; a mom of a cancer warrior who faced it and beat it. It would be crazy for me not to share that with others; to connect with them through what we have experienced.”