At the tender age of nine, you see the world through the eyes of a child, never imagining that it is possible to lose your only parent, the one on whom you depend for everything — even precious life itself, to a dreaded disease. My mother, Larvenia Brock, who got pregnant with me, her only child, when she was 44 years old, was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer the same year I was born. The day I lost her to that deadly disease changed my life forever. It was that experience — of losing her — that taught me the importance of prevention and that inspired me to take better care of myself and to help countless others do the same.
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