Evelyn Sims, 67, said she thinks there's a reason that in her group of friends, she got breast cancer first. "You can sympathize better when you have it yourself," Sims said, sitting at one of her best friends' kitchen table in Lumberton on a sunny afternoon. "It feels like you have this demon inside of you that you didn't know it was there." Sims was the first to get her routine mammogram and the subsequent news that she had Stage 1 breast cancer early in 2016. A former employee with the Hardin County Adult Probation Office, she had been enjoying retirement for just a few short months.