Though it mostly affects older and middle-aged women, half of the women who develop breast cancer are 62 years old or younger when they're diagnosed.

Kapalka's diagnosis resulted in the post-surgical pain of a mastectomy and emotional pain of questioning her survival.

"My daughter was in second grade at the time [of first diagnosis], and you think, 'Am I going to live?'"

Casting For Recovery gave her the help she didn't know she needed.

She arrived at the retreat on Friday evening to find gifts on the bed, followed by a gourmet get-to-know-you dinner with 13 others in the fishing club's lodge. Activities the next day included learning to tie flies and cast without lures, as well as watching on-stream demonstrations wherein instructors picked up the rocks "and showed us some of the bugs that live in the water."

The weekend also included candid but embarrassment-free medical discussions, opportunities for tai chi and yoga, unstructured time for simply relaxing and resting — and perhaps most fun — a campfire marshmallow-roasting session during which the women could talk about the emotional effects of breast cancer.

"I just felt pampered and cared for, and the camaraderie of women," Kapalka says.

But as she says, the actual fishing on Sunday was better still, because the only thing on your mind is the fly dancing on the water.

"You're not thinking about your treatment, or what you've been through," she says. "It's watching for indicators to come down and to see if you can get a hit and catch that fish."

Driving home that afternoon after a graduation ceremony, "I was on cloud nine, like a small kid at Christmas," she says. "I have never felt so healed inside as I did when I left that weekend."

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