Then, a lump formed. Scace went to the doctor, who said it was probably just an infection or a cyst. But the pain kept getting worse.

"My body was telling me it was going to be cancer. Any time I said it out loud, people told me I was being pessimistic. I used to have a pessimistic attitude, so my friends and family thought I was just being me."

Eventually she ended up at a breast health clinic in Ottawa.

"When the nurse started doing an ultrasound, she looked kind of shocked and I could tell it wasn't just an infection."

After learning she had a cancerous tumour, Scace and her mother, who had worked as an oncology nurse, went home to tell her father and younger brother of the diagnosis. After that, Scace invited her closest friends over for a serious conversation.

"Because I used to have a cynical humour, a couple of my friends thought I was joking. And I had to say, `No, this is real.'"

She held it together at first, but when she was wheeled into the operating room to have a partial mastectomy, the reality started to sink in. She burst into tears.

"I was about to lose half a breast and all my hair, and my entire life was going to completely change."

After the surgery, Scace started the most aggressive treatment plan going. Because of her youth, doctors wanted to do everything possible to prevent the cancer from coming back.

After the first of six chemotherapy treatments, she was throwing up 40 times a day. The drugs used to treat nausea resulting from chemotherapy weren't working.

"The drugs don't work the same way in a 50-year-old body as they do in an 18-year-old," she explains.

New drugs helped treat the nausea, but caused exhaustion. She spent the summer at the hospital and at home in bed.

On the few days when she was up for company, her friends were right by her side. But she felt left out of her own life.

"I felt like I was getting dumber," she says, explaining that she was out of school for an entire semester. "I hated putting my life on hold."

Still, she did manage to date during the treatment.

"The one guy I dated the longest, I told him right off the bat and his mom had been through something similar so he wasn't freaked," she says.

"When I read the info about what to expect, they said sexual desire would be reduced. But I thought, `I'm a teenager. I have desire 10 times stronger.'"

It turned out she was right. But there were awkward moments.

"Once, when we were making out, my eyebrow rubbed off," she remembers.

When the chemo finished in August, Scace signed up for a full course load at Carleton, on top of daily trips to the hospital for radiation treatments. She couldn't wait to get back at it.

When she speaks at the conference this weekend, Scace will present a photo exhibit she put together with help from Ottawa-based photographer Jen Thorn, 21.

Featuring nude models of all shapes, sizes and ages who have survived breast cancer, the exhibition was the main focus of a recent event in Ottawa called Raising for a Cure. Proceeds went to the Ottawa Regional Cancer Care Centre, where Scace had her treatment.

When she was sick, she had two goals in mind – things she wanted to do when she got better. The first was to give back, and she's done that already through her fundraising work.

The other? A tattoo. And as of last week, just in time for her one-year anniversary of finishing treatment, Scace fulfilled that goal. On her left arm, right near her scar, her skin is adorned with vines and flowers, plus a quote from author Kurt Vonnegut:

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."