A Local Odyssey: One Woman’s Life with Breast Cancer – Part 1

For most of her career, Beth Anne Dorman has been the one whom other people turn to in their hardest moments. As the CEO of For All Seasons and a clinician by training, she’s spent decades helping families navigate fear, trauma, and uncertainty. But when she found a lump this spring and received her cancer diagnosis in the middle of an ordinary July afternoon—parked at a baseball field beside her son—the roles reversed with dizzying speed.

In a conversation with Val Cavalheri, Beth Anne speaks with the kind of honesty that catches you off guard. She walks us through the punch-in-the-stomach moment of hearing the word “cancer,” the long week she waited before telling her children, and the careful balance of being vulnerable at home while steadying an 85-person staff at work. There are flashes of humor, too, the kind that families reach for when the ground shifts beneath them, along with the complicated truth that even without chemo, a bilateral mastectomy and a decade of hormone therapy remake your sense of self.

What emerges is not just a medical timeline but a portrait of leadership and humanity—how you let people in, how you accept help, and how you learn to live with a diagnosis that never fully leaves the room. It’s also a reminder, as Beth Anne says, that talking openly about illness and mental health isn’t a weakness. It’s the thing that keeps us connected.

This video is approximately 16 minutes in length. For more information about breast cancer, please go here.