She got the call in the middle of a dance class. That detail alone tells you something about Maya Apodaca — and about what came next.
Apodaca, a dance instructor based in Addison, Texas, was diagnosed with stage 3C inflammatory breast cancer on August 23, 2023, after noticing a lump in July that had grown, in her words, to the size of a very angry apple by mid-September. She’s now turned her fight into something far bigger than herself — a story about movement, community, and refusing to stop dancing even when the floor drops out from under you.
The Call That Changed Everything
“I was teaching, and I get a phone call, and I’m like, ‘This is my doctor, I need to take it,'” she recalled. “And that’s what she told me, that I indeed have inflammatory breast cancer. And it’s stage 3C. I broke down, and I started to cry.” It’s the kind of moment most people can’t imagine — standing in a studio full of students, the music still going, and the world quietly caving in.
What followed was grueling. Major surgeries. Chemotherapy. Radiation. The full weight of a stage 3C diagnosis pressing down on daily life. And yet, Apodaca kept dancing. Not as performance, not for anyone else — but because she needed it to survive in the most practical, get-out-of-bed sense of the word.
“It was what I needed,” she said. “It forced me to get up out of bed. It forced me to take a shower, make myself look presentable. To keep going.” That’s not a metaphor. That’s a treatment plan — one she built herself, around the only thing she knew how to do without thinking.
A Community Built Around That Exact Need
Here’s the thing about cancer that doesn’t always make the headlines: the isolation can be as devastating as the disease itself. Which is exactly why organizations like Cancer Support Community North Texas exist — and why they matter more than most people realize until they need them.
CSCNT, led by CEO Mirchelle Louis, offers a full range of free services to patients and their families — support groups, individual counseling, art therapy, nutrition classes. The organization recently opened a new 5,600-square-foot clubhouse that includes a dedicated kids’ space, a quiet acknowledgment that cancer doesn’t just happen to the person with the diagnosis. It ripples. “No one should have to go through cancer alone,” Louis stated. It’s a simple line, but in context, it carries real weight.
Still, knowing resources exist and actually reaching them are two very different things — especially when you’re exhausted, scared, and just trying to make it through the week. What Apodaca’s story illustrates is that sometimes the bridge between a patient and their recovery is something deeply personal. For her, it was a dance studio. For someone else, it might be a support group, or a nutrition class, or simply a room where someone else understands.
Movement as Medicine
Apodaca isn’t alone in finding her way back through what she already loved. A local teenager featured in a video documenting similar experiences returned to both school and dance at Arabesque Dance Academy more than a year after being declared cancer-free — proof, if any more were needed, that the return to normalcy is its own kind of victory, and that it often runs on a very specific fuel.
What does it mean to dance through cancer? Not as inspiration porn, not as a feel-good sidebar — but as a genuine, daily survival mechanism? For Apodaca, it meant showing up to the studio when her body had every reason to stay horizontal. It meant teaching other people how to move while she was still learning how to exist inside a body that had turned on her. That’s not easy. That’s not even remotely easy.
But it worked. And she’s still there — still teaching, still moving, still making the case that what keeps us going is often the thing we were doing before everything fell apart.
Some people find that kind of anchor in faith, or family, or a really stubborn refusal to quit. Maya Apodaca found it in a dance floor. And somehow, that seems exactly right.
