“It’s an adjustment I thought, I will get better at this I thought,” Owchar wrote.
Two weeks after Owchar and her husband, Dwayne, brought their twin girls home, she wrote about finding the first lump in her left breast.
“Being that I was breastfeeding I assumed it was a blocked milk duct,” she wrote. “I used warm compresses, massaged it while I nursed and watched for signs of infection as a good nurse would. The odd thing was, there was no pain.”
On May 15, Owchar was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her liver.
“And still all I can think is my kids, my sweet kids don’t deserve this; it isn’t fair,” Owchar wrote in her blog of the moment she told her family members she had cancer.
Exactly one week after her diagnosis, Owchar passed away.
“If anything can come from my blog, I hope it is the knowledge that cancer affects so many people in so many ways,” Owchar wrote.
Orbanski told Today that her sister never complained about her pain.
“She never said, ‘Why did this happen to me? She just focused on the children,” Orbanski said.
Orbanski hopes her younger sister’s strength will serve as an inspiration, and spur others to get regular check-ups.
“We want to make sure that somebody receives this message and it helps them to have early diagnosis,” Orbanski said. “If we can save one life, we’d be so happy to have another family not be devastated like we are.”
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE