The Mountain Her Doctor Was Afraid Of
How a cancer survivor traded the sofa for a trailhead, and the hidden data that proves she was right to do it.
The elevator in the Vegas hotel was the glass kind, the kind that lets you watch the lobby shrink beneath you, and Larissa Noto’s phone buzzed somewhere around the tenth floor. It was her oncologist. He wanted her to come in the following week for a PET scan, a small thing, routine. She told him she could absolutely do that. She was feeling lucky. She was, after all, already in Vegas.
His whole voice changed. Vegas? What are you doing there? There are a lot of people there.
Two weeks earlier she had taken her last hard chemo infusion for HER2-positive breast cancer. Now she was about to drive to Zion to, in her words, hug a mountain.
