If courage means being unwavering in the face of adversity, then Joyce Glicker of Huntington is the embodiment of a courageous person.

I’ve known Joyce casually through acquaintances for nearly a dozen years. Her husband, Dave, worked at 92.7 WLIR when I first started with the company, and I learned later that Joyce had been diagnosed with breast cancer….again and again and again.

Over the years, I’ve often thought about Joyce and her plight. I wondered how she was and imagined that her circumstance could have been mine or any one of us. I thought, if she could survive having cancer multiple times, then there’s hope for us all.

The youngest of five children, Joyce was only 12 years old when her mother, Mary, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“They told my mother she had six months to live,” Joyce remembers.

Mary was the rock of the family, even while she endured the horrific side effects from the chemotherapy and surgery of that time.

“My mother didn’t want me to know [what she was going through],” Joyce says. “I thought she would be dead every day when I came home [from school].” Mary lived for 26 years after her original diagnosis, and passed away in May 1999.

Three months after her mother died, Joyce discovered a lump in her breast, and she remembered thinking, “I don’t like the way this feels.”

Already more than six months pregnant with her second child, Joyce immediately scheduled a biopsy. On Aug. 11, 1999, Joyce was told she had breast cancer. She remembers the date so clearly because it was her mother’s birthday.

Dr. Jeffrey Braverman, her OB/GYN, arranged for her to have a lumpectomy, and then induced labor, which lasted for 72 hours before her son Jack was born. In the space of just three weeks, Joyce had a lumpectomy, a baby and a mastectomy.

Everything happened so fast, her family was stunned.

“None of us had time to grieve [the death of] my mother,” Joyce says. “The focus was on me and the babies.”

After the mastectomy, Joyce went through a vigorous round of chemotherapy. She remembers bringing Jack with her and rocking him in his infant seat as she received her treatment. Her hair fell out and she was sick, but her daughter Samantha, 2, and newborn son Jack needed her, so she soldiered on.

In November 2004, she passed the much-heralded “five-year mark” of being cancer free. The collective sigh of relief, however, was short-lived. Four months later, the cancer had come back and had spread to her lymph nodes; it was stage 4. Another round of chemotherapy brought hair loss and sickness, but she got through it. She talked to her children about cancer so that they wouldn’t suffer the emotional turmoil she experienced when her own mother was sick. They went together to buy a wig. Samantha and Jack drew on her head with markers, and Jack even used her wig as part of his costume for a talent show at school.

Two years later, cancer was found in her lung and chest cavity. It was her third diagnosis of the disease.

Joyce was told that her cancer was inoperable. Her oncologist, Dr. Alexander Hindenburg, who’s affiliated with Winthrop-University Hospital, gave her a perspective about cancer that she still lives by: “What you have, I don’t have a cure for,” he told Joyce. “But I don’t have a cure for diabetes, either.”

Every three weeks she went to Winthrop for a drug infusion. She was given radiation for the first time—and that was almost her undoing.

“I cried every day for six weeks,” she says. Joyce described a sensory experience that was almost overwhelming. “With radiation, you are lying on a hospital bed, and all you hear is buzzing, and you smell your flesh burning.”

Many people would break under the pressure of being diagnosed with cancer three times, plus the physical hardship of enduring chemotherapy and radiation, but Joyce was stronger than anyone realized—even herself.

Four months ago, Joyce was told that the cancer had spread to her other lung. She has no more lymph nodes left. Lifting her arms to show me what the loss of lymph nodes looks like, she says of the deep recess, “I am gutted.”

But I see Joyce differently. She is both beautiful and brave.

“I feel fine,” Joyce says. “I’m sitting here with stage 4 and fighting it. So many people have it worse than me. I go by that and say that today is a good day.”

Dr. Hindenburg also gives Joyce something very precious: hope. There are new cancer treatments and trial drugs available and he tells her, “I am not done with my bag of tricks; I’m not even close to the bottom yet.”

Joyce has been a guest speaker at Winthrop-University Hospital’s Survivor Day as well as a volunteer, an advocate and a supporter for other women with breast cancer. She chose not to join any one support group, preferring to be surrounded by her family and friends. She is especially close to her sister, Mary. “There are 17 of us [who are still friends] from grammar school,” she says. “We all take care of each other.”

Keeping a positive attitude about cancer, especially around her children, is very important to Joyce. “I don’t want to be defined by my cancer,” she says. “I tell them that this is a disease you can live with. I don’t want it to be in their face all the time.”

Working side by side with Dave at their delicatessen in Huntington, Good2Go, their shared family moments are even more precious and life-affirming. “When I go to a graduation or a game, that’s when it hits me and I say, ‘Thanks for letting me see this milestone.’”

The obstacles Joyce has had to overcome could happen to anyone, but when life brings an unexpected challenge, seemingly ordinary people can become extraordinary heroes to everyone around them. Like Joyce.

“It’s not a death sentence anymore,” she says. “It’s life. When people see me, I want them to know that.”

If you’d like to contact Joyce, email Joyce@Good2Godeli.com