A Sweet Success: Surrounded by Cancer, Mom Baked Cookies to Remedy Pain and Worry
It was in the most unlikely of places—the chemotherapy room at St. Joseph’s Hospital—that a mother and daughter's cookie-baking business, Susansnaps, was born.
Three cancer diagnoses within one family—two in a single year—is more than most people could bear. But Laura Stachler isn’t most people. She was determined to stay strong when her husband, Ken, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2003, and again in 2004 when her 22-year-old daughter, Susan Stachler Robbins, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease—the same cancer that had taken Laura’s sister’s life at the age of 28. The following year, both Ken and Susan underwent grueling chemotherapy treatments, often side by side. During that time, Laura thought of how she could bring a little sunshine into a gloomy situation. She baked cookies. Not just any cookies, she made gingersnaps to ease the nausea that her husband and daughter felt after …
