Michaela felt a sharp pain shoot from her hip while she bent over to water some plants in early May 2025. Then she fell over and couldn’t get back up.
Her husband called an ambulance and she spent the night in a hospital, where, at 57, she found out she had a mass on her spine. It was metastatic breast cancer.
“I had no warning that that was going to happen, and I was devastated. At first, I didn’t clearly understand that it was part of my breast cancer that had metastasized to my spine, which I learned was a common place for it to go,” she said.
“If I were to die prematurely, I could not imagine leaving [my husband] here. We really don’t have any family. We don’t have any children.”
When Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Michaela’s husband prepared to be forced back into the office at the Department of Transportation in Washington
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