Iowa’s cancer rates are rising as the nation’s fall. Families want answers.

Three times, Lavonne Schroeder was sent home to die.

Twenty-three years after cancer first upended her life, she was settled into one of the recliners at Cass County, Iowa's only cancer center, a blue cap covering her head as another round of chemotherapy flowed into her veins.

"I never imagined I'd be 72," she said.

Schroeder has a stage 4 granulosa cell tumor, a rare ovarian cancer that has forced her through surgery after surgery, chemotherapy, sepsis and cardiac arrest. Three years ago, while still fighting her own cancer, she cared for her husband at their farmhouse until he passed away from spinal cord cancer.

"I'm not doing very well. This is one of my lower points," Schroeder said, her voice faltering. "I never expected to live this long anyway, so whatever they tell me, I'm at peace. Whatever is going to happen in the next year, I'm at peace."

Tears welled in every corner of the room as Schroeder spoke. The steep toll cancer has taken on her life and family would be staggering almost anywhere. But in Cass County, and across the state, stories like hers are becoming unnervingly familiar.

"Living here, it has always felt like it…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/life/