13 surgery as best she could. She dyed her long blond hair a bright pink. She got a tattoo on her right calf of what she jokingly calls her spirit animal Dory, the blue fish from Finding Nemo, whose answer to lifes challenges is to say, over and over, Just keep swimming. Still, she was overwhelmed by dread early that morning as she kissed her husband, Callen, goodbye outside the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., and walked alone through the bright, empty lobby. Her hands shook as she stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button with her elbow.

Her mind was a jumble. Everyone seemed so eerily expressionless from behind their paper masks that Sapien wondered for a moment whether shed walked onto the set of analien abduction movie. She had been imagining for weeks what it would be like to leave the hospital without her left breast. Now her mind turned to an even more urgent fear: What if she became infected with the coronavirus during her short stay?

Sapien tried to replace her anxious thoughts with fighting ones. The 40-year-old hospital social worker made Tom Pettys lyrics her mantra: You can stand me up at the gates of hell, she sang to herself as she felt her consciousness give way in the operating room. But I wont back down.

When she came to three hours later, she pushed aside her worries about the treatment and procedures she still faced, nibbled on Saltines, and sipped ginger ale to stave off the nausea she felt from