For the Next Generations – Facing Cancer Together, May 2011

When I first spoke with Reenie's daughter, Kristin Gilhool, her mom was still alive, still fighting the cancer that would finally take her life.

"My mom is a hero. She's saving our lives, and the next generation and the generation after that. I could cry." And by this point, Kristin, a 39-year-old Elizabethtown mother, was choking back tears.

Kristin was so grateful to her mother, because, after suffering through breast cancer and later ovarian cancer, Reenie Hirschler did something that would ultimately protect her children. She met with the genetics counselor at Lancaster General Health and discovered she carried a genetic mutation of the BRCA2 gene that put her at extremely high risk for the two cancers and the pre-melanoma that struck her.

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