Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia. I'm Leah Tao. And today we're going to check in with an old friend.

Well, I've come to think of her as a friend because the people we feature on this show, you know, they stay with me.

And I think this young woman

in particular has stayed with you too, because I get so many emails from you asking me about

her.

We left her in a place of uncertainty, so I thought it was time to go see how she's doing.

Her name is Jenny Rao, and the original episode was called Life Interrupted.

If you've never heard it, maybe you want to press pause and go check it out.

It's from March 2014, exactly one year ago.

But for those of you who don't want to go listen or who can't remember the details of her story,

let me catch you up a bit.

So Jenny had first contacted me to say,

I have a story about seeing a stranger every time I look in the mirror.

I feel like that most mornings.

It's like the time that I've been asleep has been enough to kind of reset my memory. So it's almost this groundhog day effect of waking up and realizing what's going on.

What was going on was that Jenny, who was just 31, had had cancer of the salivary gland,

and to remove the cancer, she'd had some surgeries, which had severed the facial nerves

on the right side of her face, and paralyzed it. And Jenny and I started working on a story about

what it's like to be 31 and trying to get your life together and figure out dating and

coping with it all when only half your face is working and you're recovering from cancer

and living with your parents. And then as we were working on that story, Jenny's cancer came

back. I went with her to check her into the cancer came back.

...