He asked her to marry him on her last day of chemotherapy. More than a proposal — it was a promise.

On Nov. 7, 1991, Ann Sasser was at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for her final chemotherapy treatment, carrying all the hope that came with that.

For nearly two and a half years she’d spent long hours at St. Jude, watching the Disney Channel with younger patients, even though she already was in college. She smiled when nurses pointed to her during needle sticks and told the little ones, “Watch Ann. She’s not going to cry.” All the while, she wondered what her future held — or if she’d get a future at all. 

On that big day, her medical team crowded around her for a No More Chemo party, a tradition at St. Jude. Confetti fluttered to the floor. Nurses hugged her. Disbelief gave way to relief.

Ann didn’t yet know what was waiting in the lobby — or how the celebration was only half of what this big day held in store for her. 

Ann walked out and saw a crowd waiting before she understood why everyone was there. At the center stood her boyfriend, Tim Brinkmann, holding a small ring box. “When you see a ring box, you kind of know,” Ann said later. 

Tim asked her to marry him. He slid the ring onto her finger with steady hands. “I was very confident she would say yes,” Tim said. 

And she did. 

‘Leukemia and Me’

On her 21st birthday more than two years earlier, Ann had learned she had T‑cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia — the rarer, more aggressive kind — and that it had already spread beyond her bone marrow.

That summer of 1989, she’d been taking classes at Memphis State University when she felt a tightness in her throat that made it hard to breathe. Her mom took her to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Within days, Ann was gasping for air.

At her local hospital, doctors discovered her lymph nodes were so swollen they were pressing on her windpipe. She had a dangerous buildup of fluid around her heart. Ann was rushed into surgery to drain it, then given emergency radiation over the weekend to shrink her swollen lymph nodes and keep her airway open — radiation that would save her life and, decades later, threaten it again.

Even though acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, can occur at any age, it is overwhelmingly diagnosed in children and considered a pediatric cancer. 

Ann was an adult. She thought she was too old for a children’s hospital. But teens and young adults often fare better on pediatric leukemia protocols. 

Ann was referred to St. Jude.  Ann remembers wondering if it would be weird. She was given a book, “Leukemia and Me,” written for kids, to help her understand her illness. It was then that she realized how serious it was, that she could die. But her team at St. Jude was encouraging. “St. Jude gave me the feeling I could overcome my cancer,” Ann said. 

Ann drove herself to St. Jude on Sundays for lab work. Family and friends, including Tim, accompanied her to chemotherapy. The first three months of almost two and a half years of chemotherapy were the most intense. She was nauseous and exhausted.

Ann was a child of the 1980s, when hair was big, bold, feathered just so, a little bit Farrah Fawcett and a lot of attitude. So, when chemotherapy caused her hair to fall out, she wore wigs.

Instead of it being weird to be treated at a children’s hospital, Ann found herself in awe of her young fellow patients, sitting side-by-side with them in the medicine room. She befriended a funny, feisty girl, about 8 years old, whose grit and determination would stay with her for the rest of her life. Years later, Ann would name her own daughter after her.

Tim meets Ann

At Memphis State, which changed its name to the University of Memphis in 1994, everyone in Ann’s sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta, knew Tim. He was a Sigma Chi and her sorority’s coach for Derby Days, a festival featuring the campus’s most spirited Greek traditions — skits, competitions, water-balloon tosses and go-cart parades.

Tim and Ann noticed each other, but either Ann had a boyfriend or Tim was dating someone, the timing never quite right. Then, in March 1991, during spring break of their senior year, Ann and Tim ran into each other, but she spiked a fever and had to be readmitted to St. Jude with low blood counts.

A week later, when she was discharged, she went out and ran into Tim. That night, he offered her a ride home in his 1985 Jeep CJ7 — with the top off. Ann clung to her wig the entire drive to keep it from blowing away. 

For their first date, they went to Jim's Place Restaurant & Bar in East Memphis, where Tim had once worked, but Ann had never been. When he picked her up, he had put the top back on the Jeep.

There was laughter. Ease. A steadiness about him. 

They had been dating for about four months when Ann took off her wig in front of Tim for the first time, an emotional moment that revealed not only her baldness but her vulnerability. Tim told her she was beautiful.

He meant it.

‘Bills from St. Jude?’

Fourteen months later — long enough for Ann’s hair to grow about three inches long — they married in 1993 at a church a few miles from their alma mater. A week later, in their first apartment together, Tim asked Ann a practical question: “So when are the bills from St. Jude going to start arriving?” Now that they were married, he expected her debt would be his responsibility, too. 

“There are no bills from St. Jude,” Ann told him. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food. Then she asked softly, “You married me thinking you were going to pay off leukemia treatment?”

He had. And he would have. Tim saw Ann sick in college. He saw what St. Jude did.

Over the years, as they built a business — growing their wine and spirits business to two stores and a distributorship before selling — they supported St. Jude. Today, Tim serves on the Nashville St. Jude Executive Leadership Council, connecting partners, recruiting supporters, organizing fundraisers and securing auction items for events.

Ann’s commitment runs as deep. After graduating from college with a degree in marketing, she went to work, including in donor services at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, and then at St. Jude as the Director of Volunteer Services.

“I see little pieces of me there still,” Ann said. Programs she had a hand in. Items she helped design, including the information desk in the main lobby of the Patient Care Center. She helped run the gift shop and on a project that suspended more than 100 international flags from the atrium of the Danny Thomas Research Center — each flag representing the homeland of an employee, a visual testament to the global workforce that pursues the mission of St. Jude.

When Ann worked at St. Jude, she often stopped to talk with families. Sometimes staff would tell her, “This family needs to see you.” Ann understood. She was a real-life example: a survivor, all grown up, with a career she loved, married and a mother. Proof of what was possible.

Her story is a gift she offers others, shared at St. Jude events and in everyday life. “We all have a story,” Ann said. “My story helps people and inspires people.” It especially resonates with those going through their own painful experiences. “I know what I needed when I went through it,” Ann said. “When people have something tragic happen in their lives, they want it acknowledged.” They want their stories heard.

Not once, but twice

St. Jude saved Ann’s life — and it helped save her again. 

Through the St. Jude LIFE Study — a long-term research program that brings childhood cancer survivors back to St. Jude as adults for regular, comprehensive health evaluations — Ann was warned more than a decade ago that the emergency radiation she received in 1989 increased her risk for breast cancer. Ann believed, “It wasn’t a matter of if but when.” So, coupled with a family history of breast cancer, she was diligent about getting screened regularly. 

In June 2023, 3-D imaging caught the smallest growth, the size of the head of a pin. It was stage 1. Ann wasn’t as scared as she might have been because of what she’d been through. She had a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery and has shown no evidence of cancer since.

As part of the St. Jude LIFE Study, Ann returns every five years for three days of testing. “That gives me so much reassurance,” she said. The study not only tracks late effects like secondary cancers and cognitive changes — including the above average short-term memory loss she experiences for someone her age from chemotherapy — but also helps researchers better understand how to protect future survivors. Ann, who is 57 now, likes that anything learned from her could mean better odds for kids like the ones she sat beside in the medicine room. 

‘Second engagement ring’

Tim wears a St. Jude pin — a silhouette of a child — every day. “I always say that’s his second engagement ring,” Ann said, smiling at him. In a way, it is. When Tim committed to Ann, he also committed to the hospital that made their life together possible.

“I’ve been given incredible gifts,” Tim said. Thirty-three years of marriage to Ann. Three grown children — Alexandria, Nicole and Ty. The life they built. 

Their devotion to St. Jude is rooted in gratitude. It is for the children Ann sat beside in the medicine room. It is for the future she worried she might not get. 

Everyone who supports St. Jude has a reason why. “This is my why,” Tim said, looking at his wife. “My why is Ann Sasser Brinkmann.”