MAYO, Fla. — The low point came in February for Karen Jacobs.

Battling breast cancer — and a host of other issues, some related and some not — for 10 months had taken its toll on the 27-year-old.

Beaten down and sick, Jacobs was tired of fighting.

“I would have told you my life was ruined,” Jacobs said last month at her trailer in Mayo. “I was sick. I was going to die and nobody was going to love me and my children weren’t going to know who I was. It was going to be miserable.”

It had already been a pretty miserable 10 months for Jacobs.

From finding the lump while getting in the shower after a day at work to being diagnosed once she was able to see a doctor nearly a month later with Stage 3 cancer to the four different kinds of chemotherapy she received from July 2017 through December 2017.

That wasn’t all, though.

“Day we told the landlord she had cancer, he told us we had 30 days to move because he had more bad news,” Jacobs’ mother Connie Gaskin said.

So after living with her then-boyfriend and three children in hotels for awhile, Jacobs found a house that accepted pets in September 2017. That lasted until January, right around the time she was supposed to have her first surgery to remove her left breast.

She was attacked by her then-boyfriend days after the surgery as well.

“Isn’t having cancer enough?” Jacobs said. “Why does all this other stuff have to happen on top of it?

“This is the first time I can say that I had the time to just focus on getting better since being diagnosed with cancer last year. Life has just been so hectic this entire time.”

Her battle with cancer has been hectic too.

In April 2018, she began receiving proton therapy, a radiation treatment in which technicians are able to precisely target and deliver high radiation doses in order to minimize the damage to nearby organs such as the heart — in Jacksonville.

When a new tumor showed up, she began receiving treatments twice a day and began staying in Jacksonville.

“Almost like a little vacation,” Jacobs said.

At first.

But then her skin began “to melt off” from the radiation and she developed an infection. So after stopping treatments early in June, she spent that month trying to get her skin to heal.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like that,” she said. “They had never treated anyone as extensively as me because they stepped it up…They got afraid it was fighting back, so they upped it a little bit and it took a real toll on my body.”

After a second surgery in July, she developed an infection around the wound.

As it began to heal, doctors found another infection and expected to find it was also Pseudomonas areuginosa. But after waking up from that surgery, Jacobs noticed something wasn’t right.

“I noticed everybody came in the room wearing weird suits, like gowns over their clothes,” she said.

When Jacobs and Gaskin asked, they were told the second infection turned out to be MRSA.

“It’s been an adventure,” Jacobs said about the 18-month ordeal from which she is still recovering, adding she still has to have another surgery to remove her other breast.

But as tough as it’s been — being away from her children Kayleigh (8), Kaleb (3) and Kassie (2) and fearing for awhile that she would die without her two youngest remembering her — Jacobs said she’s learned a lot as well.

“I’ve learned that I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was, especially emotionally,” she said. “God always provides. Just when you get hopeless is when God shows up to let you know that hope isn’t gone.”