Ms. Menser’s mother, Stephanie Bashore, said that her 36-year-old daughter has advanced uterine cancer, as well as cervical cancer, and needs surgery to remove her uterus and the tissue around it. On the day Ms. Menser was sentenced, her mother said, she had been scheduled to meet with her oncologist to discuss a last-ditch effort to treat the disease.

Ms. Bashore said that a doctor recently told her daughter, “If you don’t get this done, you will die. It is eating you up inside.”

Ms. Bashore said that her daughter had been working at a fast-food restaurant and had put many problems behind her. Her lawyer, Scot Feeman, asked Judge Samuel A. Kline to allow her to serve any sentence through home confinement so that she could continue to be treated at the Penn State Cancer Institute in nearby Hershey, Pa. Through an assistant, the judge declined to comment.

Mr. Feeman said that Ms. Menser had a history of minor drug and theft crimes, and that both the 2018 shoplifting charge she pleaded guilty to — a third-degree felony — and the sentence handed down were in line for someone with her criminal history.