Dianria Rivera (Provided to WINK News) COVID-19 is giving a teacher with cancer a silver lining: the gift of teaching once again. Dianria Rivera knows what it feels like to be in isolation. “I spent months just thinking I’m not being…I don’t have a purpose right now. I’m just sitting here,” she said. Unlike the rest of us, the North Fort Myers High School teacher didn’t spend all that time alone because of the coronavirus. “The first thing they tell you is not to Google the kind of tumor,” she said. “It was a brain tumor. Medulloblastoma. And I had three pieces of it on the cerebellum.” So advanced, surgery was immediate, giving no time for the Spanish teacher and girls tennis coach to tell her students. “You get to know a little bit of the kids. It’s kind of like you get attached to them. It’s kind of like your family. You see them every day,” she said. It was six months of treatment and surgery and not knowing if she would survive. When the scans came back clear, she had a sense of victory most of us can’t, and hopefully won’t ever need to, understand. Cancer free, but still not free to be with her students. “My white blood cells are low and I can’t be in contact with a lot of people until I regain that,” Rivera said. So when she learned the pandemic had advanced enough to move classes online, she said, “The first thing I asked was if I could go back to teaching.” The answer: she can, and she is. “I’m happy now…just knowing I can be of help to them it gives me a reason to wake up,” she said. Her message to all of us in the middle of this pandemic is no matter how dark it gets, “you cannot be in that thought for so long. You need to pull yourself and think, ‘I can get out of this.'” God knows she did and now, so do her students. Rivera says her students helped her hold onto hope, with more than 200 of them sending her cards in the hospital.