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SALT LAKE CITY — A Salt Lake City woman was shocked after hearing her name in an online video from Guam when she realized the bottle she had thrown into the ocean three years earlier had been found.
Brittanie Penrose was 24 years old, battling brain cancer, and visiting family in California when she threw a bottle with a message in it into the ocean. The Salt Lake City resident said she was uncertain about her future the night she cast a letter about herself into the Pacific Ocean.
Three years later, video from a Guam online newspaper showed Linda Tatreau reading the letter found earlier this week.
"Hello, my name is Brittanie Somebody," Tatreau said, reading from the letter.
Tatreau is a science teacher at George Washington High School in Guam. Her classes clean the beaches on Guam's shores and often find messages in bottles. She uses the exercise to track the ocean patterns and teach her students about the tides.
One of Tatreau's students found Penrose's message in the bottle. They opened it during a celebration in front of hundreds of students.
Penrose said she was amazed to realize how far she has come since writing the letter about herself three years earlier.
"I just described me and what I'm doing, and at the time I was a phlebotomist and was fighting cancer," Penrose said.
Penrose is now 27 and fittingly, she is once again in California, visiting family.
She said she was on a similar visit three years ago — as she fought through chemotherapy and the trials of her cancer — that she found herself walking along the beach searching for answers.
"And we headed to the ocean, and threw it off the pier," Penrose said.
The note in the bottle contained a message about her life, her dog, and even her cancer. The bottle traveled from Oceanside Pier in San Diego County, California nearly 6,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean until it was found by Linda Tatreau's high school students this week. "I was just in total shock," Penrose said. "I was like, ‘Is this real? This can't be happening.' "
Penrose said the part of the letter about her cancer had been faded by the sun, and was too worn out to read. But she said that may not just be coincidence. Her cancer is currently in remission.
