Coffee with All4Cure - Kathy

I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I played sports growing up, loved softball and volleyball as a child, and played soccer throughout college. Now, my husband and I still love to hike and spend time outdoors. Back in January, I was able to hike with my husband and my youngest daughter to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then back out again! We love to travel, which has kind of been limited during this time. As the pandemic wore on, we decided to buy an RV. We started looking for used RVs and we purchased one at the end of June to do some short trips. My doctor doesn’t recommend flying anytime soon, so we’ll be driving around for a while! We try to take every day one at a time. Don’t look back, don't look forward, focus on the present. You take it one day at a time. You just have to focus and adapt when things change and they’re out of your control. That’s probably the best advice that I’ve ever been given and not only one person has told me that, I’ve heard it over and over again. There’s always going to be ups and downs and challenges in your life. Try not to always focus on the negatives, but try to find the positive in the negative. That will get you through the difficult times. The Grand Canyon trip was a journey much like my myeloma journey. You’re going through ups and downs in your life-- same thing with the Grand Canyon. You go down, and then you’re able to make it out… and say that you did it.

I’m a retired medical technologist. I worked for 15 years in clinical and research labs. When I had my third child, that was the breaking point for me working outside the home and I found other ways to put my time to good use. I always told my kids that I was a professional volunteer after that point because there were so many ways to volunteer in the community through my church and their schools. Now, after myeloma, I’ve found even more ways so I continue to spend a lot of my time volunteering. You receive so much support from organizations when you get a diagnosis like this and I’m always looking for ways to give back to all types of communities. Since I was a medical technologist, I’m kind of really into science and always trying to find out more. I’ve become a student of this disease from the beginning. I try to learn everything I can, and share it too. I joined a blood cancer support group in the area and later helped start a myeloma support group at the University of Chicago in the Fall of 2018. I think it’s so valuable to share information with others who have the same disease as you. In the regular blood support group, there happened to be a myeloma patient who was a 20-year survivor. And up until that point, I had been reading stuff on the internet about how survival was in months, not years. And here I meet someone in person who’s lived 20 years! It just gave me so much hope.