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If life is a highway, Luba Banuke paid tribute to her most recent milestone by going sky to sea, celebrating her 70th birthday Monday with a hike atop Whistler Mountain and then following up later with a dip in the ocean at Port Moody to cool down.

We should all be so active entering our eighth decade but what makes Banuke’s story remarkable is 12 years ago she was told she had terminal blood cancer, the rare T-cell lymphoma, and only a couple of years to live.

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She has Steve, a pilot in the United States Air Force, to thank. It was he who had the matching HLA (human leukocyte antigen) and whose donated stem cells saved Banuke’s life.

Today she is cancer-free, looking forward to a forthcoming trip to the Balkans, and celebrating the 10th anniversary of her transplant with Steve, who arrived in Vancouver on Thursday with his wife.

“It was really, really tough to digest and I was not accepting that this was happening to me,” Banuke said of that day she was diagnosed in 2007.