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It was a pretty moment for Gagne -- an everyday scene that would have been unimaginable for her a decade ago, when the headaches and the nausea started.

On Tuesday afternoon last week, inside her little cottage -- an 1800s Greek revival of sorts -- opposite a Baptist church on Route 49 in Washington County, Gagne, 48, told her story.

She grew up near Kingsbury and moved to Fort Edward with her family as a young teen, and she married Dan, from Bacon Hill, when she was 18 and he was 24. They moved to Greenwich, then in 1994, with their son Jason, the family moved to Cossayuna.

With a child-care business -- Rising Star Daycare -- up and running, all seemed well in the world. But in January 1996, after suffering through an agonizing year in which her chronic pain, sickness and fatigue went undiagnosed, Gagne's condition deteriorated sharply.

"I couldn't see anything," she said. "Everything was yellow."

She was dizzy standing up and dizzy sitting down.

She couldn't move, and she still has vast gaps in her memory.

She had to close her business and figure out what was wrong.

Gagne was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation hemorrhage, which is a complicated way of saying that a tangle of arteries and veins in Gagne's brain -- which were malformed before birth -- had begun to bleed.

After a short time at Glens Falls Hospital, Gagne was transported to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, where the hemorrhage alerted doctors to the fact that Gagne had an unrelated aneurysm in her brain.

The aneurysm was treated with a number of therapies, including one in which a catheter is inserted into the body, and fed all the way from the pelvis into the brain, where thin titanium coils are slid into the aneurysm to clot the blood. But as gruesome as that treatment sounds, Gagne still had to go through the trauma of a full craniotomy at Boston's Brigham & Womens Hospital the following month. Gagne's husband Dan said the family was lucky to be insured at the time, through a local mill he worked for.

"Thank God," Gagne said.

"It would have folded us," Dan added.

When she got back from hospital, Gagne said, she became "kind of whiny, wondering if I should be doing better." So she asked her doctor about what her level of progress should be.

The doctor replied, "Laurie, you should be dead."

"So I guess I'm actually doing well," Gagne said, smiling. "Less than 5 percent of those with this kind of bleeding live, and those that do are vegetables."

But Laurie was still sick, and she also became reclusive. She underwent almost a year of counseling, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It's like when someone dies, and you're busy going through it, then it hits you afterward," she said. "It's almost like starting your life over."

And that she intends to do. On her living room table, along with a bible and a few novels, is a book called "Where and How to Sell What You Write."

Gagne's sole goal now is to get published, having written a few chapters of a book called "Insights on Surviving a Serious Illness from a Christian Perspective."

She is also working on a scrapbooking business (www.treasuredphotosscrapbooking.com). Gagne takes people's photos and other mementos, and makes them into journals.

It's a registered business in progress, and although she has only had a couple of commissions, pouring over other people's happy memories gives her something positive to do while she regains her strength and composure.