Community Rallies Behind Wall Iraq Vet, Mom Of 3 Fighting Cancer

WALL, NJ — As Wall mom of three, Iraq veteran and high school teacher Sandy Alexandra Jessop fights the advanced form of breast cancer she was diagnosed with earlier this year, the community has been rallying behind her.

"She’s such a courageous, inspiring, kind, and wise friend," Christa Lapinig Recio, who started a GoFundMe page to help the family while they focus on the treatment, told Patch. "Her beauty on the inside surpasses her beauty on the outside."

The two women served in Iraq together during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, along with Jessop's husband. Sandy even delivered Recio's firstborn.

"When she told me and another close friend the news, it was like we had breast cancer ourselves," Recio said. "Throughout this year, I kept putting myself in her shoes. She and I both have three sons. If I couldn’t work to help support my household, I just know it’s a burden that could easily be lifted with the help of everyone she’s touched in her life."

As of Tuesday, the GoFundMe page had reached just over $15,000.

"When I was first diagnosed I received gifts in the mail every single day for almost two months," Jessop wrote. "When I started chemo, my friends and family did a meal train for us and showed up to help with our kids."

Throughout the past few months, the 36-year-old has been writing about her journey publicly on social media.

"Initially, it was honestly to document the journey for myself, my family, and someday my kids," she said. "When I was first diagnosed, I honestly knew next to nothing about cancer. All I knew about breast cancer, was from watching Samantha Jones on Sex and The City. So I thought, why not share what it’s like instead of hiding."

Jessop's Instagram feed is a mosaic of doctor's visits, insights into the journey of someone battling cancer ("Did you know chemo can really affect your oral health," she writes in a post), highs and lows, family moments, inner thoughts and raw emotional accounts.

She shared everything from how she found a lump to her son's first birthday.

"I knew when I had him, he may be my last. I wanted to enjoy every single part of him," she wrote. "I can never get this precious time with my baby back (...) The rest of my life that I will have with him."

As time went by, Jessop's started finding a community of people who had likewise been touched by breast cancer.

"It became a place where I would seek guidance, an ear, an encouraging story, a woman who says it’s ok to not be ok," she said.

Eventually, she found that newly diagnosed women were reaching out to her looking for the same guidance she had once longed for herself.

"The way many women chose to share the most intimate details of something that can be so dark, is inspiring," she said, "When all that dark stuff is put into the light, it doesn’t seem that scary anymore."

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