Terryn Drieling Isn’t Done Moving Mountains

The morning Terryn Drieling found out she had cancer, the snow was still on the ground and the holidays hadn’t yet let go.

Terryn Drieling of the Nebraska Sandhills — rancher, writer, and founder of Faith Family and Beef — is using her Love Bomb to bring her family back to the Black Hills for their annual ski trip, a tradition that reminds her what “good movement” really means.

“It was December 26th,” she said. “Dr. Yung called and told me I had, in fact, grown a cancer — an ER/PR positive invasive ductal carcinoma, to be exact.”

She’d gone in only after her husband and a friend insisted. “I’d had lumpy breasts before,” she said. “Gone in, had them checked out, and they were always nothing. I honestly thought this was more of the same.”

It wasn’t.

She remembers the hallway at the radiology clinic. The waiting. The radiologist’s tone when he said the mammogram looked good — but they’d do an ultrasound “just to be sure.” And the feeling that settled in her chest when “just to be sure” turned into a biopsy that same afternoon.

“The pain and the itch from the biopsy was nothing compared to the waiting,” she said. “It’s true what Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers say — the waiting really is the hardest part.”

When the call finally came, she was angry, and scared. “Angry that I had to go through any of it,” she said. “Scared of the uncertainty. Scared for my family, my husband, my kids.”

She was at her in-laws’ house that day, and her mother-in-law — who had faced breast cancer two decades earlier — held her in the way only someone who’s been there can. “Things were a lot different twenty-something years later,” she said. “But her presence and the way she held me, Tom, and the kids was just what I needed in that moment.”

The MRI came next, showing clear lymph nodes but a shadow of concern in the right breast. A follow-up ultrasound gave the all-clear. Still, something about the first surgeon she met didn’t feel right.

“I got a second opinion in Omaha at the Fred and Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, and I loved my team there,” she said. “They laid everything out for me and told me, ‘We’ll give you everything we know and recommend, but at the end of the day, you are the boss.’ That was way more my vibe.”

Her surgery — a bilateral mastectomy — was scheduled for February 11.

From the day after Christmas to the morning she checked in for surgery, she went all in on her inner work. “With the help of music through the Safe and Sound Protocol, I reset my nervous system. I kept going to therapy. I listened to the Welcoming Prayer and jammed to ‘Wonder’ by Natalie Merchant daily,” she said. “So when February 11th rolled around, I was ready to rock the shit out of that surgery. And I did.”

Afterward, she spent three weeks recovering with her best friend near Omaha — close enough to her care team if anything went wrong, far enough from home to let her body and mind rest. “That three weeks was simultaneously hard and beautiful,” she said. “The care Sheila gave me and the way she held me through the hard was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced.”

When the pathology came back, the news was as good as it gets in cancer language: clear lymph nodes, a smaller tumor than expected, and an Oncotype DX score so low that chemo wouldn’t add any measurable benefit. Just a decade of Tamoxifen. “I take my pill daily and try to work the kinks surgery put in my left arm out,” she said. “Other than that, I’m back at it — loving on my people, ranching, and just livin’.”

Drieling’s story didn’t begin with cancer, and she refuses to let it end there.

Terryn Drieling works cattle on horseback near her family’s home in the Nebraska Sandhills.

“I grew up in northeast Nebraska on a small feed yard,” she said. “I was in 4-H for as long as they’d let me — showed horses, dogs, and cattle. I had big dreams of becoming a veterinarian when I grew up.”

Physics ruined that plan, she jokes. Instead, she earned a degree in animal science with an emphasis in feedyard management and stayed on at her internship as “the intern that never left.”

“I stayed on the animal health crew for seven years,” she said. “I was on my way to becoming a feed yard manager, which had become my new dream after the whole physics incident.”

When the feed yard changed ownership, she resigned. Her husband, Tom, accepted a position on a large ranch in the Sandhills. “I fell in love with ranch life and these Sandhills,” she said. “It’s funny how that happens, how God works, because now I can’t imagine my life anywhere else. These hills are my home.”

Leaving the feed yard opened space for something new. She began blogging about ranch life and recipes under the name Faith Family and Beef. “That went on for a good little while — about seven years — before I started shifting my focus toward helping others in a different way,” she said.

From the back of a horse in the Nebraska Sandhills, Terryn Drieling feels most at home. The rancher and writer is reclaiming her rhythm after breast cancer, finding healing in the work, the land, and the life she loves.

Her work now is about people, about movement, about healing.

“In 2016, I was moving cattle and thinking about the stockmanship phrase ‘good movement draws good movement,’” she said. “I started wondering if that worked with people too.”

Two years later, she started writing about it — connecting stockmanship to self-awareness and empathy. That led to teaching others. “Before I knew it, I was leading Enneagram trainings on ranches in several states,” she said. “I had quit blogging and was fully embracing this drawing good movement gig.”

Then came May 5, 2023.

Her father — her “first favorite human,” she called him — died suddenly in an accident. “He was my role model, my source of comfort, my spiritual director,” she said. “Losing him broke me in ways I didn’t know were possible.”

The week before his death, she had scheduled her first counseling appointment. Five days later, she was sitting in it. “I knew my old habits and my lack of emotional processing weren’t going to work,” she said. “I wouldn’t survive the grief doing things the way I’d always done. That’s when the real healing began.”

Through that work, she found what she calls her purpose — disrupting how rural America talks about mental and emotional health. “I’m working to bring people back from what’s normal to what’s natural,” she said. “To break the generational cycles that keep us stuck.”

She pauses before summing it up. “In short, I am a disruptor.”

Now, with treatment behind her, she’s looking ahead to the thing her family looks forward to all year: their annual ski trip to Terry Peak in the Black Hills.

“We rent a cabin, ski the days away, hang out by the fireplace or in the hot tub in the evenings, and just really enjoy our time in the Hills with good company,” she said.

Cancer forced them to cancel last year’s trip. “I’d already secured the cabin and lift tickets, but it fell right in line with what I like to call ‘the lightning round’ of healing,” she said.

Her Love Bomb grant will make sure the 2026 trip happens. “If I were to be bombed with love, I’d use it to help fund our ski trip — complete with lift tickets for Terry Peak and a cozy cabin in the hills,” she said.

She laughs when she talks about it. “It took me two years to get off the bunny slope,” she said. “But now I just love skiing with and spending time with my people. It’s something we all look forward to the whole year.”

After everything, she’s earned it — the trip, the laughter, the slow mornings, the space to breathe.

Because if “good movement draws good movement,” Terryn Drieling has set a whole lot of it in motion.