Lisa Newell is nervous as she signs in at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The nurse at the check-in desk clips a plastic identification bracelet onto her wrist, and Newell sits down in a simple chair near a large window overlooking Seattle’s Lake Union. Nearby, Eli, her 13-year-old son, sits playing a handheld video game.

“I’m usually not this anxious for test results,” said Newell, who was visiting the hospital on Thursday last April to hear the results of her latest PET scan — a process that measures abnormal cell activity in her body. “I just want to be done with it for a little while,” she added.

Newell was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in April 2006, five months after her youngest child, Joey, was born. Cancer had already spread through her body — it was diagnosed only after two tumors in her neck caused a fracture. Her cancer is treatable but not curable.

It went into submission after aggressive radiation and chemotherapy but returned like an unwelcomed guest in July 2008.

Newell is disarmingly candid about her situation. When she’s not recovering

from chemotherapy, her freckled face is quick to break into a smile.

“I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to,” she says.

With three young children — her middle child, Sammy, is five — Newell doesn’t have time to dwell on her cancer.

Chemotherapy wears her down, though. She’s sick for three days after her weekly treatment. She’s already lost her hair twice during each round of chemotherapy. But at least it grows back on her scalp, which is covered by short salt-and-pepper hair. She used to have long hair but likes the pixie cut forced on her by chemotherapy.

“If I had my eyebrows and eyelashes, it wouldn’t be so bad,” she says.

Depending on her PET scan results, she will either have to continue chemotherapy through July or she’ll be finished with it.

Newell had a break from the treatment the week before, which included her sixth wedding anniversary on the previous Friday.

“I remembered how much fun it is to not have chemo,” and that the week is seven, not just four days long, she says.

She and her husband, Vernie, were able to go out for a nice dinner with close friends. Most Fridays, she’s too nauseous to go out.

Newell roots through her purse looking for a pill bottle. She pulls out an Iron Man action figure, her phone and finally the bottle — anti-nausea medicine.

“It says take every 12 hours; I take it every six — not good,” she says, holding the bottle up.

Her doctor brings the results. The cancer has shrunk, she tells Newell. It is “very minimal but it is still there” in her sternum.

That means three more months of chemotherapy.

“I was hoping, you know, for the best results — that it would be all gone,” she says.

Newell’s already endured radiation, two rounds of chemotherapy and a heavy regimen of drugs.

“If (chemotherapy) makes a difference, I’ll endure it until I can’t any longer,” she says.

After the meeting, Newell and Eli go up one floor for her chemotherapy treatment.

She sits on a hospital bed, while the nurses prepare the medications — up to four at times. Eli takes off his shoes and disappears to raid the pantry with food for patients. He comes back with Oreo cookies, macaroni and cheese and a soda.

Usually, Newell comes alone — it’s the only time she gets to herself, she says.

She calls her husband to tell him the news, while Eli flips around on the television mounted to the wall. Vernie is the principal at Snoqualmie Middle School — Eli’s school.

They have to plan around her chemotherapy. Once a week Newell drives into Seattle for treatment, which takes four hours, and she can’t do much over the next three days. Vernie’s concerned that he won’t have time to coach Eli’s Little League baseball team.

Newell hangs up. She has a long look on her face. She absently stares at her phone in her hand, before putting it in her purse.

“He’s not going to coach baseball,” she says.

Eli turns away from the television.

“He’s joking, right?” he says.

Newell regains her usual positive demeanor.

“Yeah, he’s just worried,” she says, reassuring Eli.

As the oldest, he’s helped his mother and step-father manage her cancer treatments. He watches his younger brothers when she can hardly get out of bed.

Newell was very frank with Eli when she was diagnosed.

“Does cancer kill people?” she remembers him asking her.

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Could it kill you?”

“Yeah, but until then we’re not going to worry about it,” she told Eli.

Her youngest children never knew or don’t remember their mother before cancer.

Newell made sure Eli participated at their church, Our Lady of Sorrows, in Snoqualmie, so he would have another outlet. Most Sundays, she’s too sick to go to church herself.

She wears a pendant of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer, on a chain that belonged to grandmother.

Newell comes from a “big Italian family, but they worry too much,” she says.

Her friends want to help, but often don’t know how.

For support, Newell started a coffee group last year of cancer survivors and patients. About 20 of them meet one Saturday morning a month.

“We don’t just sit there and talk about cancer,” she says. They give each other practical advice about life in general.

“Someone always takes something away from these coffee groups.”

The year before, Newell got involved in Relay for Life, which raises money for the American Cancer Society to use for cancer research, and she is now one of the event’s local organizers.

Teams raise money through fundraisers and donations for running. In 2008, over 3.5 million people participated in the event, which was started by a Tacoma doctor in the mid-’80s, according to the event’s Web site.

Fundraising for the relay has been difficult for Newell because of the economic recession.

“I feel bad asking people for money, but you have to ask or you don’t get any money,” she says.

With the event only days away, she hopes there is still time to get enough pledges to match the amount raised last year.