On May 20, 2008, Judy Baker found out the lump in her breast was cancerous. It was only the beginning of a bad day.

It had been a rough time for the Brookfield family, as daughter Rachel had been admitted to the hospital two days earlier due to a persistent fever and suspicious blood work. Earlier in the year Rachel had mononucleosis and both she and her roommate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania had each battled the virulent infection methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, the super bug.

While waiting for the results of a test of Rachel’s bone marrow, Mrs. Baker, now 48, got the bad news about her own health.

Mrs. Baker sat at her then 19-year-old daughter’s bedside for a couple hours before another doctor delivered more bad news — Rachel had lymphoma.

“She was really calm about the whole thing,” Mrs. Baker said of her daughter.

After the diagnosis was delivered, Mrs. Baker dropped more bad news on her daughter.

“I said ‘We’ll do this together. We’re going to go bald together,’” Mrs. Baker said. “ ‘We’ll be our own support group.’ And we really were.”

Miss Baker is conflicted about her feelings about them both having cancer at the same time.

“It made it a little bit easier having someone right there going through the same thing with you, but I didn’t want it to have to be her,” Miss Baker said.

The duo got through the ordeal with chemotherapy and possibly an even stronger dose of humor.

“You can’t help but laugh and smile when you’re around her,” Miss Baker said of her mother.

“I think we both have a very light personality,” Mrs. Baker said. “We like to joke and tease each other. That was such a big help.”

Mrs. Baker has a lot of tales about her daughter’s spirit through their battle with cancer. All the nurses would fight over who got Miss Baker as their patient, her mother said.

Because Miss Baker couldn’t sit in bed for long periods because of the potential for blood clots, the pair walked the halls of the hospital a lot. Mrs. Baker said that when they’d pass the glass partition at the nurses’ station at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, Rachel would pretend to disappear down a flight of stairs and then come back up.