Last year Niam Moody planned her son’s 12th birthday a bit different than others.

Instead of making dessert from scratch, she bought an ice cream cake. Instead of following a party theme, the boys played football in the backyard as Moody ordered a pizza.

The day after her son’s birthday, Moody went into surgery to remove the Stage 2B breast cancer a mammogram had revealed weeks before.

“My life was very carefree as a stay-at-home mom raising two young boys and volunteering,” Moody said. “But when the doctor said ‘cancer,’ well that, of course, changed.”

Moody’s doctor said she had inherited the same type of cancer her grandmother had.

She tried to imagine what her life would look like as a patient, but the only memory she had of the disease impacting her family was her grandma’s quiet remarks of how she didn’t like the way she looked after surgery. Moody’s doctor said she would probably lose her hair, and she knew that meant chemotherapy.

The first thing Moody did was apologize to her husband.

“I looked at him and I knew I couldn’t be the wife and the mom I wanted to be at that point. ... Someone was going to have to take care of me, and that’s very difficult. I take care of everyone else,” she said. “As a mom, that’s what we do.”

Twice a week she spent six to eight hours a day in chemotherapy. The rest of the week she spent in bed, recovering.

When she first walked into the infusion room for chemotherapy, Moody saw a group of recliners in a circle facing each other. She didn’t notice the room was off-white or the motivational art on the walls. She saw the patients hooked up to tubes feeding them medicine.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to look like that soon, I’ll look like a patient.’ I didn’t know how important that circle was going to be for me,” she said. “As a mom, there was shuffling kids to practices, having their friends over, having other parents over. When I started treatments, my community became the other patients.”

Moody opted to have a port in her chest to receive the treatment. The first dose of drugs cleansed the port, and she felt a cold rush over her body. As the next dose began, she felt her heart race. Another dose made her heart slow, and her eyes felt heavy.

That first day, she was either laughing or crying.

“I sat down next to a woman with Stage 4 ovarian cancer,” Moody recalled. “She had been going through chemo treatments for five years, going on six. She kept telling me how OK it was — that the nurses were nice, or the time went by faster than expected.”

Each patient shared their own personal saga with cancer.

The woman who had been there the longest became the caretaker of the group.

A man provided comic relief by sharing hard-to-believe stories with other patients who would debate whether the tales were true.

A 70-year-old woman spent most of her time arguing with doctors, telling them she was not as sick as she looked, that she was naturally 89 pounds. The same woman would joke with nurses who plugged in her port, asking them, “Could you mix a cocktail for me and put that in there?”

Moody said she began to view the room as a “secret society” — a community within Kalispell quietly fighting for their lives from the confines of their recliners.

From that room, Moody watched the seasons change from fall to winter and then the first days of spring.

“You’re sitting there, and you’re watching outside, and you’re thinking life is moving, even though I feel like it’s not moving for me,” she said. “But inside, you’re fighting the battle of not wanting to be there, to not be in pain, but knowing that to stop treatment meant not living more than five years. The people next to me made that easier.”

When old friends called, Moody tried to catch them up with her life, but the infusion room and days in bed were hard to describe.

As her anxiety and depression grew, Moody began to seek the support of a larger community of patients. She joined the Cancer Support Community, where cancer was the normal topic for a group of people going through an abnormal experience. Some were still going through treatment while others were working to find normality after being told they were cancer-free.

“I took from all their experiences,” she said. “We talked about depression, being bald ... losing our eyelashes, being cold all the time. I used their strengths, too. Sometimes we even mourned together.”

The community suspected another infusion room patient died after that person stopped showing up for treatment. Confidentiality requirements prevented nurses and doctors from sharing the news of a death, but often a family member would return to the group and confirm the rumor, or patients eventually guessed what had happened.

The man who made Moody laugh was one of the first people she knew who died. Two more followed.

“That’s part of the hard part of this battle, some people go on to rehabilitation, others on to hospice and some never come back,” Moody said.

Moody was declared cancer-free on April 15 this year.

Now that she’s in the category of “survivor,” it’s hard to imagine her life without being part of the cancer community.

She still spends free time at the Cancer Support Community, where she found peace and balance amid the calm chaos she felt she faced alone.

She had to wean herself off going to the infusion room when she felt anxious — a place that initially felt scary and threatening had morphed into security.

“I still feel like I’m working myself awkwardly through everyday life, but I’m excited to move on — to make plans for years down the road again because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “But once you’re in this society, you don’t ever want to fully leave. Because that’s a community who gets it.”

Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.