Ocean Lakes

Gilder Radner once said, “The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.” Meet Jeanine Jeanine Patten-Coble was diagnosed with cancer on June 15, 2009 and took a beach vacation with her family the very next day. She came across an area of houses and a playground that had previously been owned by the US Coast Guard but had been abandoned for five years. “All week long, these houses kept calling to me, in a way that I cannot explain. Sometimes you do not know what you are supposed to do until you trip across your destiny. In my case, I feel like I ran right into it on a warm summer day in my running shoes. This experience is what led me to develop the plan for Little Pink Houses of Hope.  The beach is a place where we were able to reconnect and get stronger as a family as ...

When you think of October at Ocean Lakes, you probably envision the creepy sites, the crazy costumes and other Halloween fun. But there’s another special group that quietly makes Ocean Lakes a regular stop every October. Ocean Lakes partners with Little Pink Houses of Hope , which provides free beach vacations to breast cancer patients and their families. The goal is to promote recovery by offering opportunities to connect and celebrate life in a beach setting. About eight to 11 breast cancer patients and their families come to Ocean Lakes through the Burlington, N.C.-based non-profit every October, which coincidentally happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Little Pink Houses, which has about a dozen beach retreats in the United States every year, arranges the details of the vacations so the families can simply show up and start having fun. “All they have to do is just get themselves here,” said Cristi Seay, the Myrtle Beach Retreat Coordinator...