It’s lunchtime on a recent spring break afternoon and Stephanie Packer is in her kitchen, preparing lunch with her four children.
"Do you want to help?" she asks the eager crowd of siblings gathered tightly around her at the stovetop.
"Yeah!" yells 5-year-0ld Savannah.
"I do!" says Jacob, 8.
Calmly managing four kids as each vies for the chance to help make chicken salad sandwiches can be trying. But for Packer, these are the moments she cherishes.
In 2012, after suffering a series of debilitating lung infections, she went to a doctor who diagnosed her with scleroderma. The autoimmune disease causes hardening of the skin and (in about one third of cases) other organs. The doctor told Packer that it had settled in her lungs.
"And I said, 'OK, what does this mean for me?' " she recalls. "And he said, 'Well, with this condition...you have about three years left to live.' "
Initially, Packer recalls, the news was just too overwhelming to talk about with anyone -- including her husband.
"So we just … carried on," she says. "And it took us about a month before my husband and I started discussing (the diagnosis). I think we both needed to process it separately and figure out what that really meant."