



When Dolly Stringer was diagnosed with breast cancer in April, she decided to take control and shave her head before she began chemotherapy.

Now, the Moultrie, Ga., woman believes she got cancer for a reason: to save her husband's life.

To show solidarity with Stringer, her husband, Bud, decided to shave his head. His family members were curious about the black patch on his newly-shaved pate.

"And I said 'you know, I'm sure that's a birthmark,' but I didn't realize I had one so I called my mom and she said 'no, it's not a birthmark, you didn't have one,'" Bud Stringer told ABC News in an interview on Monday.

He decided it was a mole, but a biopsy proved him wrong: it was stage three malignant melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer.

RELATED: Cancer survivor's wife makes unusual donation to Connecticut hospital

The Stringers, who have a son who's 12 and another who's 10, were stunned. They had never had any health problems before.

"I was just really in shock and Bud was, too … and I was just devastated, because it's one thing to have it yourself, that I could handle, but to know that Bud was going to have to go through what I was going through, and worse?" Dolly, 47, said.

Dolly had had several surgeries since her stage three breast cancer diagnosis, and completed her eighth - and final round - of chemotherapy last week. She is preparing to start six and a half weeks of radiation treatment.

Bud's treatment will be more intense. Since his cancer is so aggressive, his treatment will have to be as well. Diagnosed in August, he's already had two extensive surgeries, and is preparing to start a year of chemotherapy. Bud said he'll have chemotherapy five days a week for the first month, and will do self-injections of chemo for 11 months after that.

Despite their troubles, the two - married for nearly 20 years - are upbeat.

"The surgeons down at Moffitt (Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.), they all feel very positive about the eventual outcome, that it will be very good," Bud said.

Dolly's prognosis is also good. She said her doctor told her she had a "garden-variety" type of cancer. She believes her illness has a greater purpose.

"I now know that I had to have that to save Bud's life, because he would have been - the doctor told me that I would have been burying him probably by Christmas" if the melanoma hadn't been diagnosed and treated, she said, adding, "We just have so, so much to be thankful for."

Story continues