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VANCOUVER — Jen Kish says the month of July has been “nothing but happiness” and when you consider everything that’s happened to her in the last fortnight, you can understand her state of bliss.

Last week, she was introduced as the captain of the Canadian women’s rugby sevens team, which heads to the Rio Olympics with gold-medal aspirations. That same week she celebrated her 28th birthday with her teammates, the league of extraordinary women she calls her sisterhood.

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Somewhere down the line, there likely will be a tattoo to commemorate these events because Kish, it seems, has been inked up for less significant milestones in her life. She estimates she has 20 tattoos and says “every one tells a story.”

But there’s also a story she has yet to memorialize, maybe because it’s too fresh, maybe because the final version has yet to be written. If July 2016 has seen Kish at her happiest, July 2015 was a different time and a different place. Then, she was competing in the Pan Am Games in Toronto while, a world away, her father Steve was having a massive tumour removed from his stomach in Indonesia.

“This was my first Pan Am Games,” Kish says. “It was my birthday. July was supposed to be a great month for me. And there’s my dad and I didn’t know if he was going to live or die.