FARGO -- A Fargo woman has taken her breast cancer story and turned the experience into some life lessons we can all learn from.

How a pilgrimage to Spain changed how she dealt with her cancer. Two cancers.

"I think of it as life," Colleen said, as she talked about the pilgrimage and the cancer diagnoses.

Colleen Ford-Dunker of Fargo remembers exactly where she was when she noticed the lump. She was on Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain in 2018.

"When I felt the lump, I thought 'This is not new,' but it feels different," Colleen said.

Once back in Fargo, the diagnosis. A breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones; a slow-growing incurable cancer. Again in 2021, another, new breast cancer diagnosis.

"The second one was very aggressive but treatable," Colleen said.

Thankfully, Ford-Dunker is a very "glass half-full" kind of person: "I arrived there at Easter, it was a Lenten walk for me," Colleen said of the Camino pilgrimage.

She kept thinking back to that Camino walk, before all this started.

"And I had many instances where the same scenario would repeat itself. I would see myself walking on this path and I would look up and I would see this path out into the distance and think, 'That's where I am spending the next few hours of my life,' but in a few kilometers the path would turn this way," she said. "And this happened over and over again, and I thought what God was telling me is I don't know what's ahead, you don't know what's coming. All you know is where your feet are. That's all you know. Don't get too far ahead of yourself."

She didn't focus on the diagnosis, but instead on living.

"I think of it as life, everyone is dealt something. This is what I was dealt," Ford-Dunker said.

She is a phone nurse at Sanford. She admits her experience with cancer has made her a better nurse. Oncologists at Roger Maris say these stories from survivors are key.

"It is heartwarming but it is also really impactful and helpful because when someone sees someone moving beyond diagnosis and beyond therapy, it takes away some of the fear," she said.

Ford-Dunker is already planning another pilgrimage back to the Camino. A walk, she says, that helped her deal with her cancer. Instead of a cancer battle, Colleen just made it part of her life story. A story of a survivor.

October is national Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and experts say 360,000 people will be diagnosed with the disease in 2024 alone.