"I am pretty active. Hiking. Canoeing. Skiing."

Karen Desjardins has a love for outdoors and also, a love for children. Pregnant the second year of her marriage was a dream come true. Little did she know how fast her dream would be gone.

"Had a miscarriage and lost the baby at 11 and a half weeks. I was devastated," Desjardins said.

It wasn't long before they were trying to get pregnant again when she felt a painful lump in her breast. She was 36 years old and had breast cancer. She began chemotherapy immediately. Having a baby was out of the question.

"At that point in time, they were recommending that you don’t have children because the pregnancy would feed the cancer and cause the cancer to come back," said Desjardins.

She had a lumpectomy, chemo, followed by radiation and the realization she could not have her own child. A year later, she felt terrific and decided to adopt an older child.

"The next thing you know, we are on a plane to Brazil and lived in a hotel for a month with two children from an orphanage, three and six. The girl was three and the boy was six. And we fell immediately in love with the boy and he with us. We were so happy that he was going to be our son. The problem was the little girl who was his half sister who only had lived with him for the past six months because she lived in a different orphanage and she had never lived with a family and was abandoned at nine months. She had behavioral problems I have never seen,” Desjardins said.

The story is not a happy one. The young boy they were going to adopt had a little sister who had severe, psychological problems and because the orphanage would not split the children up, they had to leave both of them behind.

"We still celebrate his birthday. He is 18 now and we don't know what happened to him," said Desjardins.

Still wanting to adopt, she decided on a Chinese baby girl, but three months before they were to leave, a bout of severe stomach pain brought on a trip to the doctor who confirmed very bad news.

"I remember the outfit I was wearing. I remember the squared linoleum I was on because he said, 'surgeons are good people, they save us, but they are sometimes blunt in their language' and he said, ‘ah, colon cancer. It has to come out immediately because you have total blockage’” Desjardins said.

Stage two colon cancer. It was a long year. Surgery followed by intense chemotherapy. Once again, a failed attempt at being a mom.

"I wasn't going to get my baby in China. Of course the minute I was diagnosed with colon cancer, we had to call the adoption agency and they said, 'we are sorry.' They were wonderful to us but they said, 'We can't wait for you,' Desjardins said.

So once again, more chemo and no baby. The treatment for her colon cancer was much worse than it was for her breast cancer, but her journey is not done.