Two weeks after giving birth to her first and only son in 2006, Stephanie Pfeil received life-changing news.
"My very first thought was, 'Am I going to be here to see Caden grow up?'" Pfeil said. "And my next thought was, 'Do I need to start making videos so Caden remembers me?'"
At just 27 years old, Pfeil was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Doctors told her she had an 8% chance of survival.
After discussing treatment options with a surgeon, Pfeil's dad, Michael Schnabel, took the lead.
"I stood up and I just said, 'Listen, we are going to beat this. We are going to go ahead and form a team. We're going to go ahead and promise to take you to the best physicians, the best research centers that we can take you to. We will do everything and you will never be alone,'" Schnabel said.
Pfeil's parents, husband and infant stuck by her through two surgeries and chemotherapy.
Then, three years after the original diagnosis, the family received news they did not see coming.
"When we walked out, we said, 'Did you hear him right? Did you hear him say cured?" Schnabel recounted. "And then we made a spectacle of ourselves in the waiting room. I mean, we were grabbing each other, we were crying, we were laughing, we were hugging each other — it was incredible."
Now, more than a decade later, Schnabel has taken journal entries from that time and turned them into a book for the world to read.
He took the lead writing but worked with his daughter to compare notes and put the whole picture together.
"It's hard at times because I am reliving it, but it also helps me realize — wow, I really was strong, and I really am a fighter and I really did get through this," Pfeil said.
Now, with Pfeil healthy, her son Caden an active teenager and her parents enjoying retirement, the story that started as a nightmare in 2006 has a happy ending in 2023.
"I was stage four, metastasis to my liver — not a lot of people made it past that," Pfeil said. "So my hope is to give other people hope."
Schnabel talked about the lessons he's learned from his daughter's journey.
"I read somewhere a long time ago that our lives are not defined by the things that happen to us but much more by the way that we deal with these things, and I think that's really true," Schnabel said. "So fight."
Thursday, March 23, is the release date for the memoir titled "Daddy's Girl." It is available wherever books are sold.
Schnabel and Pfeil are holding a book signing at the Barnes and Noble at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas, at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 25.
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