Diane Nienas
Episode 327
5 MAY 2025
She participated as a young student-athlete in cheerleading, volleyball, softball, and basketball. She was captain of the volleyball team, two years after the team went undefeated in the conference, won sectionals, and advanced to state for the first time in program history. In her adult years she continued her athletic involvement in leagues for both sand volleyball and softball. She is a #1 best-selling author of five books and is a speaker and certified grief coach, as inspired by having lost two of her four sons in the last few years, with one of the boys having been very active in ice hockey and powerlifting.
Notable guest quotes:
“Amongst this land that we owned, we also had our own baseball diamond. And it set up for just a really beautiful space for us, during holidays and family gatherings, to have our own little competitive game of baseball with each other.”
“At age two, his health drastically changed. He was diagnosed with leukodystrophy. And it basically stripped him of all of his motor functions to the point where he was kind of trapped in a still body and unable to move or speak or eat.”
“We were actually told that Leo most likely would not see his third birthday. And the way his health was progressing that first year of diagnosis it truly looked like that was going to be the route that was going to be taken. But God definitely had a different plan.”
“He put the hard work in that never went unnoticed, but the gift of just that physical ability was definitely something that God gave him.”
“I’m thinking it’s a concussion and we arrived, and we find out that he’s being diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme, which is brain cancer.”
“His only options were going to be radiation and chemotherapy, which, both of them were not going to have a positive long-term effect. It was going to prolong his diagnosis from what they thought would maybe be about 6-8 months untreated, but then less than two years is what they were giving him at that point.”
“This faith perspective is honestly the piece of my story that I just, I just want to encourage people to step through their grief and to truly find hope. It is something that is so clearly a gift from God.”
“In a seven-year time period, we lost eight family members, including my mom and dad and my brother and aunt and uncle.”
“There was so many moments of situations like this over the course of Leo’s lifetime that just built my faith in this time of tremendous sorrow to be able to see that God’s hand was on all of it even when we felt like we were in the darkest of valley.”
“When you witness what I was able to see, I cannot shout from the mountaintop any louder about the hope that God surrounded us with.”
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