As she looks back, the family-focused communities of southern Utah were perfect victims for the circumstances. "We trusted the government. We never would have spoken out, we were patriotic," she says.

"We were actually the perfect guinea pigs."

And Peterson was one who suspected nothing until a couple of her classmates died. Darwin Hoyt, a year younger and so cute. He lost his hair, all but a couple of sprigs, she says, and Bruce Stone got bone cancer and had to have part of his leg amputated. Her best friend's mother died a terrible death of colon cancer. There was a lot of talk about the herds of dead sheep over to the west.

But it wasn't until Peterson was grown, when her own little Bethany got so sick, that Peterson knew the true toll of the tests.

First, 3-year-old Bethany cried out each night from pain in her legs. And her tummy hurt, she told her mom.

Doctors couldn't tell what was wrong, but finally a St. George orthopedist told Claudia Peterson her daughter had a virus that had settled in her joints. A few nights later, the girl woke screaming in her sleep. Dismissed by an emergency room doctor and another physician in the next two days, the girl's pain raged on.

Peterson and her mother finally drove Bethany to Salt Lake City in the middle of the night. "Something is wrong with this child and no one is helping us" she yelled to the emergency room staff when they arrived at Primary Children's Medical Center.

The next day, the girl was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma, a germ cell malfunction that created a tumor the size of an orange in her belly.

For two years Claudia and Philip Peterson made the five-hour drive to Primary Children's every week for Bethany's chemotherapy. Afterword, Bethany, normally so feisty and mischievous, would be drugged, exhausted, vomiting non-stop.

By 4, Bethany's world became a parade of doctors and medicine. She would play with her dolls and lovingly offer "five cc's of Vincristin." She knew the name of every medicine and had adjusted to their impact on her small body, Claudia Peterson said. "She would puke on her way out to play."

She lost her hair but never wore a wig. People on the street thought she way a boy.

"I'm not a boy, can't you tell?" Bethany would correct. "I have cancer and I'm getting chemotherapy."

Mom and Dad were trying to maintain composure for Bethany and the other two children, but Peterson sighed remembering the hardship on the family.

"I was barely holding it together. I had a sick child, my father had just died, my grandparents had died and I had a sister with six kids who was dying too," Peterson said. "I was trying to be so together, and inside I was just screaming."