It seems fitting that Melissa and I forged our friendship under wildly unusual circumstances. We met at the first meeting I ever had with the then brand-new PTSA president of Chinook Middle School, Melissa Johnson, back in 2016. About thirty minutes in, I realized that six years earlier, I'd sued her parents. It remains the only lawsuit I've ever filed, and it was in defense of my Weimaraner, who'd been bitten by her mother's newly adopted Scottie. Yes, you can imagine how unimaginable the physics of that one was. I blurted out, "Oh no, we can't be friends. I sued your parents!" To which she replied, "I'm sure they deserved it. What did they do?" We both about fell out of our chairs laughing, and for the ten years since, we've never really stopped.

 

So, this is truly the hardest story I've ever had to write for Greet West Bellevue. But it is a story about all the greatest things that make life worth living; love, smarts, humor, resilience, adaptability, grit, and grace. A year ago, Melissa was diagnosed with endometrial adenocarcinoma. It started, as these things so often do, with symptoms that didn't add up. Through the summer of 2025 she was told it was a UTI, then perimenopause. Antibiotics. Ultrasounds. Reassurance. "Your tests look good, I have very low suspicion of cancer," her OB/GYN told her. "You'll stop bleeding in a year or so." 

Melissa believed it, mostly, but something kept nagging at her. On a Friday drive up to Whistler, she stopped at a ZoomCare so she wouldn't have to hunt for a doctor across the border. The PA there treated her and, almost as an afterthought, mentioned a women's health doctor coming in the following Sunday. Melissa went. That doctor looked at the same picture everyone else had seen and read it differently: clearly menopause, she said, but she was concerned about cancer, concerned enough to biopsy right there in the room. 

On July 29th, 2025, Melissa got the call. Endometrial adenocarcinoma, what she's taken to calling, with the dark humor that has carried her through this whole year, "the good cancer. They take your parts and you're done. No follow-up." She and her husband, Dave, canceled the trip of a lifetime (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands) and scrambled to unload the F1 Zandvoort race package they'd built the whole itinerary around. On August 14th, instead of touring a fjord, Melissa had a complete hysterectomy. And that's when the story took its first hard turn: it wasn't “the good cancer” after all. It was aggressive, behaving more like an ovarian cancer than the tidy, contained thing she'd been promised. 

What followed was a year most of us can't fully picture unless we've lived it. A port, placed just in time for Melissa to talk her doctor into a long weekend in Amsterdam for the F1 race before treatment locked her down, a trip she describes as an unbelievable memory with Dave and their son Kyle, made sweeter by everything that's happened since. Six rounds of chemo that wrapped up December 29th. A PET scan on January 7 that lit up "hot nodes." A second surgery on January 14th. Twenty-eight rounds of radiation, five days a week, through March 16th. 

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, during the last stretch of chemo and the early days of radiation, Melissa was quietly applying for jobs. "Being a cancer patient was not a good use of my time or my brain capacity," she told me, and if you know Melissa, you know that's exactly the kind of thing she'd say. She found Summer Search, an organization that supports young people from high school through college and into the workforce, and on April 6th she started as the Executive Director of their Seattle branch. Proud doesn't begin to cover it. 

I wish I could tell you the story bent upward from there. It didn't. A scan in May showed the cancer had spread through her abdomen and shut down both intestines. On June 3rd, Melissa had major surgery for a colostomy bag and an ileostomy bag, less than sixty days into a brand-new job. Her company, to their enormous credit, doubled down on her instead of stepping back. Three weeks later, she started her current line of treatment. Between the surgery and the new chemo, Melissa now uses a wheelchair when she's out and is limited even at home. She's still working full time. She still makes every ounce of time she can for her grandkids. 

Here's the part of this story I most wanted to tell, because it's the part that sounds like Melissa to me: in January, back when the outlook was still hopeful, she helped her husband, Dave, create a watch brand. He handled the design; she weighed in on strategy and advertising, because that's how they've always worked: together. Dave named it Octanis. The octant was the instrument sailors used for navigation before the sextant existed, and Dave comes from a long line of shipbuilders and tugboat captains. There's also a constellation, Octans, visible in the southern hemisphere, that speaks to his lifelong love of astronomy. And the number eight carries its own weight: Dave and Melissa, their three sons, their daughter-in-law, and their two grandbabies, eight people who make up the family this brand was quietly built for. 

Octanis's first shipment landed in late July, almost exactly one year after Melissa's diagnosis, after years of dreaming, months of research, and weeks of prototyping. A second line launches in September: a run of pastels, designed in Melissa's honor. Dave has done all of this while working full time at Google and serving, in every sense of the word, as Melissa's full-time caregiver. Google's paid family leave gave him six weeks at home with her after the June surgery, and Melissa doesn't take that for granted for one second. 

When I ask Melissa how she's really, really, really doing, she doesn't perform positivity, and she doesn't perform despair either. She just tells the truth. Cancer, she says plainly, sucks. She's lost so much of her independence. No one can tell her whether she has months or years, which is its own particular kind of unbearable for a family with a junior in high school. She can't travel anymore. She can do almost anything from a seated position but can't walk very far, and she traded in the Mercedes convertible she'd dreamed about her whole life (and had only owned for two years) for a wheelchair, so she could still get to the park with her grandbabies. She is rarely without pain. She works from Fred Hutch Cancer Center about as often as she works from her home office, held up by a care team, a palliative care team, a nursing team, an integrative medicine team, none of which, she'll tell you, gives back what she had a year ago. 

And then, in the very same breath, she'll tell you she's grateful. For insurance. For access to some of the best cancer care in the country. For family that continues to bring the joy. For friends who show up with meals, rides, and flowers. And for the acts of kindness from her village: friends who tend her flowerpots because they know it brings a smile, friends who stay with her when the family travels, friends who pull Dave out of the house for a few hours so he can breathe. Family, friends, neighbors, pets, love... continuously showing up because that is what we do for each other, for ourselves, and for Melissa.  

Melissa would also like me to add that coffee is on her if you'd like to learn more about her amazing employer, the organization summersearch.org or the Johnson family watch brand octaniswatches.com; just send her a message through either site. Every day she's out there advocating for others, putting good vibes and care into her community and her family. I’ve witnessed the positive impact SummerSearch has on kids in our area, and I've seen the watches in person too, and they're gorgeous. The perfect gift if you're looking for something sentimental, lux, and local as we head into the gift-giving season. 

I don't know how many more visits I'll be allowed to regale her with my crazy family stories, where we laugh at my parents' questionable decisions and latest hobbies. I cherish every moment I have with this woman who has always been larger than life, always got me laughing to tears, and continues to be one of the strongest people I know. What I want people to take from this story isn't her diagnosis, or her statistics, or even her extraordinary grace coupled with fortitude. It's that a whole, full life can keep happening inside a year like this one. A watch brand can be born. A dream job can start. Grandbabies can still be chased around a park. Happiness can happen, just viewed from a different vantage point. My friend is still exactly, entirely herself. That's the story I most needed to tell. 

With love and awe for the courage, grace, humor, and light you continue to put into this world, Allison