Lesli Moore Dahlke
In 1970 Lesli Moore Dahlke traveled to Vietnam as an 18-year old civilian girl, sponsored by the US Army at Christmas time to provide morale and friendly support to the young soldiers who were so far away during the Holidays. At the end of the Christmas tour, she returned home with many photos, memories, and stories for a lifetime, and resumed my normal life. In June of 1990, she heard the heart stopping words …”you have cancer”. She was subsequently diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma — a large abdominal retroperitoneal liposarcoma. On the day of diagnosis, the life she knew abruptly ended. Lesli Moore Dahlke was 38. She has had cancer or been actively involved in its related treatments, follow-thru, challenges, heartbreaks, losses, and so many battles for twenty years. She recently said” When looking at the whole of my life, I have been involved with cancer for more than a third of my years. The struggles of invasive surgery, chemo and getting used to the adjustment of the loss of so many internal organs — while literally learning to live all over again — was an earthshaking change to a happy life.”
