STORIES

Everyone has a story.

Some begin in rough waters. Some begin with a moment that changes everything. Some are stories of illness, loss, resilience, love, community or simply finding the strength to keep going.

Shark Harbor Stories are about the people behind those moments, and the people who swim beside them.

These stories aren't about perfect endings.

They're about showing up.

They're about reminding each other that even in life's hardest moments, we don't have to face them alone.

This is where we share them.

Corinne’s Story

No One Swims Alone.

Long before Shark Harbor, before cancer, before Florida, before I understood what it meant to need people to carry you through the roughest waters of your life, there was my dad.

I was born in New York, the oldest of three children. My father was my hero.

He was also complicated.

My dad had lived through more by the time I was born than many people experience in a lifetime. He grew up with very little. He battled cancer at only 20 years old. Illness would follow him throughout much of his life.

And then he had me.

I was just like him.

Big personality. Driven. Emotional. A lot of heart. Probably a little too much of everything.

We loved each other fiercely, but we also butted heads fiercely. Looking back now, I think sometimes the things we struggled with most in each other were the things we shared.

As his health became worse, I didn't know how to handle watching my hero be sick. So sometimes I pulled away.

Growing up, one of my greatest fears was becoming my dad.

I watched illness change what he could do. I watched it take pieces of the life he had worked so hard to build, including his career.

I loved my father more than I knew how to say.

But I was terrified that one day his story would become mine.

Maybe that's part of the reason I worked so hard to build my own.

The Life I Built

For much of my life, I never felt quite good enough.

So I worked.

And worked.

And worked some more.

I put myself through college while working full time. I earned master's degrees in accounting and finance, followed in my father's footsteps and became an accountant.

In 2007, I earned my CPA.

My dad had tried to earn his years before, but life, illness, family and everything that came with it got in the way.

When I passed mine, he said something I've never forgotten:

"You are officially smarter than me."

I knew better.

But coming from my dad, it meant everything.

He died the following year.

Life kept moving. I became a mom to Jake and then Jaxson. Eventually, my marriage ended.

Then I met Doug.

In July 2019, we packed up and moved from New York to Florida to start over.

At that point, so much of my identity was wrapped up in two things:

My children and my career.

I was a mom.

I was a CPA.

I was someone who worked hard, handled things, solved problems and kept going.

Doug and I had also started talking about having a child together.

We were building our new life.

And then I went for my annual physical.

The Phone Call

My OBGYN sent me for a mammogram.

I was 40. I'd had a baseline mammogram a few years earlier, and I almost canceled this one.

Life was busy. I was working full time, raising Jake and Jaxson, and we had just moved our entire lives to Florida.

There were a hundred reasons not to go.

But something made me keep that appointment.

I didn't know my doctor had felt a lump.

I went for the mammogram on Monday.

That night, they called me back for a diagnostic mammogram.

Tuesday, they told me I needed a biopsy.

Friday, I had it done.

I remember looking around the room and knowing from the way everyone looked at me.

Something was wrong.

Monday, the phone rang.

It was cancer.

HER2-negative. Estrogen receptor-positive. Progesterone receptor-positive. A high Ki-67 proliferation rate.

The cancer was aggressive and growing quickly.

And just like that, my life stopped.

And Then, Six Days Later...

That Sunday, I realized it had been about five weeks since my last period.

I took a pregnancy test.

Positive.

I took another.

Positive.

I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. And I was pregnant.

There really aren't words for what it feels like to be terrified for your own life and overwhelmed with joy about another one at the exact same time.

How do you fight to save yourself while protecting the tiny person growing inside of you?

I didn't know.

But we were about to find out.

Being pregnant didn't just complicate treatment. It complicated our ability to even determine exactly what we were dealing with.

Some of the testing normally used to stage my cancer couldn't be done while I was pregnant. By the time doctors could complete the staging process, I'd already been through 10 rounds of chemotherapy and given birth.

So the stage I was eventually given could never tell us exactly where I had started.

On January 7, 2020, I started chemotherapy while pregnant.

Then COVID hit.

The world shut down while ours was already completely upside down.

I went through 10 rounds of chemotherapy while carrying Jaden.

Every treatment carried fear.

Every pregnancy milestone felt like a victory.

But they were victories I kept mostly to myself.

I Hid

Back home in New York, only my immediate family knew I was pregnant and had cancer.

Outside of that tiny circle, no one knew what was happening to me in Florida.

I couldn't handle telling people. I couldn't handle their questions or their fear. And I couldn't handle saying the words over and over and making what was happening more real than it already was.

So I went dark.

I hid.

When chemotherapy took my hair, I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I covered mirrors and reflective glass because I couldn't bear to see the woman looking back at me.

I didn't recognize her.

I was carrying a child while facing the possibility of my own death. Jake and Jaxson needed their mother. Jaden was growing inside me, completely dependent on the choices I was making to save my own life.

There were doctors. Treatment plans. Science.

But none of that could remove the weight I felt as their mother.

It was too much.

So for a while, hiding was how I survived.

Then, on June 5, 2020, the night before my 41st birthday, I finally told the world part of the truth.

I posted that I had breast cancer.

The response was overwhelming.

Love. Messages. Support. People reaching out from everywhere.

But there was still one enormous secret.

I was pregnant.

I needed to know he was here.

I needed to know he was safe.

On June 17, 2020, he was.

Jaden was here.

Jaden was safe.

And for the first time in months, I could breathe.

And Then Everyone Knew

After Jaden was born, I could finally share the whole story.

And suddenly, the story I had worked so hard to hide wasn't hidden anymore.

We were featured in a few articles.

And then something completely surreal happened.

Kristen Bell heard our story.

Yes. That Kristen Bell.

For approximately five minutes, I was Insta-famous. 😂

Through Hello Bello, we were gifted a year's worth of diapers for our miracle baby.

It was surreal. Funny. Incredibly generous.

But when I look back now, the part that matters most isn't that Kristen Bell knew our story.

It's that someone who didn't know us chose to show up for us.

And she wasn't the only one.

People we knew showed up.

People we barely knew showed up.

People we'd never met showed up.

At the time, I had no idea those moments would eventually become the foundation of something called Shark Harbor.

I only knew that every time someone showed up, the water felt a little less lonely.

Cancer Wasn't the End of the Story

I wish I could tell you Jaden was born, I finished cancer treatment and life slowly returned to normal.

It didn't.

Four weeks after giving birth, I had a double mastectomy.

Then came more chemotherapy.

Twenty-five rounds of radiation.

Reconstruction.

More procedures.

Surgery after surgery.

I developed severe lymphedema and eventually underwent a lymph node transfer in an attempt to improve it.

By 2026, I had undergone eight surgeries.

And somewhere along the way, I lost something I'd spent most of my life building.

My career.

The girl who worked full time while putting herself through school, earned two master's degrees and became a CPA could no longer work.

My body had changed.

My brain had changed.

My energy had changed.

Chronic pain, overwhelming fatigue and health complications became part of everyday life.

There are days I try to be me.

There are other days when getting out of bed feels impossible.

And there was an irony I couldn't ignore.

The thing I'd feared since childhood had happened.

Illness had changed my life, just as I'd watched it change my father's.

For someone who spent her entire life believing she needed to accomplish more, work harder and prove she was enough, losing many of the things that once defined me left me with a question I'm still figuring out:

Who am I when I can't prove my worth by what I accomplish?

I Was Never Swimming Alone

There is another part of this story.

And it's the reason you're reading it here.

Through every treatment, surgery, diagnosis, setback and day I couldn't get out of bed, there were people beside me.

My boys.

Jake, Jaxson and Jaden have been my lifeline.

They've lived through things children shouldn't have to understand. They've seen their mom sick. They've adapted when plans changed because I couldn't physically do what we'd planned.

And they've made me laugh when I desperately needed to laugh.

They're the reason I keep getting back up.

Doug has been my rock.

He has stood beside me through a life neither of us could possibly have imagined when we started over together in Florida.

And then there were all the people we didn't even know would become part of our story.

Friends.

Neighbors.

Schools.

Teachers.

Other parents.

An entire community.

Someone organized a meal train.

Someone brought dinner.

Someone sent a message.

Someone checked in.

Someone remembered.

Someone simply showed up.

Some of the people who first entered my life because my family needed a meal became dear friends, people I might never have known if life hadn't fallen apart.

That's the strange thing about rough water.

Sometimes it introduces you to the people who eventually become part of your harbor.

Why Shark Harbor

My story isn't finished.

I wish I could write that everything is better now.

It isn't.

There are still doctors, procedures, pain, exhaustion and uncertainty.

There are still days when getting out of bed feels impossible.

There are still moments when I grieve the woman I used to be and the life I thought I would have.

I'm still learning who I am now.

But I know something today that I didn't understand when all of this began.

Even on my worst days, I was never swimming alone.

That is what Shark Harbor means to me.

It isn't about pretending the rough waters eventually disappear.

They don't.

It's about knowing that when the water gets rough, someone can swim beside you.

They don't have to fix it.

They don't need the right words.

They don't have to make it better.

Sometimes they just need to be there.

And when you're able, maybe you turn around and become that person for someone else.

The Parts Worth Becoming

Which brings me back to my dad.

I spent much of my life terrified that one day I would become him.

And in some ways, I did.

Illness changed my life.

I lost my career.

My body began determining what I could and couldn't do.

The future I imagined for myself changed.

But it took becoming sick myself to finally understand something about my father that I couldn't understand when I was younger.

Sometimes you can't fix it.

You can't make the pain disappear.

You can't make someone better.

You can't always change the water they're in.

But you can stay.

You can show up.

You can remind them that they matter.

You can make sure they know they're not alone.

And maybe becoming like my father was never something I needed to fear.

Because I didn't inherit only the parts of his life that scared me.

I inherited his heart.

His enormous capacity to love.

The part of him that kept going when life gave him every reason not to.

And yes.

I definitely inherited that big personality.

I don't know what my body will allow me to do tomorrow, next year or ten years from now.

I don't know what other rough waters may be ahead.

But I know what illness cannot take from me.

I can love.

I can have heart.

I can continue to show up for people in whatever ways I am able.

Maybe I didn't need to spend my life afraid of becoming my dad.

Maybe I just needed to understand which parts of him were worth becoming.

And after everything this life has taught me, perhaps that's what I want to pass on most:

You don't have to save someone to make a difference in their life.

Sometimes you just have to swim beside them.

No One Swims Alone.