Coffee with All4Cure - Keith

I’m an author. I’ve written three books, and I'm working on my fourth. My passion for writing started about 25 years ago when I began writing down my experiences as a player, coach, and avid fan of all Boston sports. Every day I’d write something-- a paragraph, a page, a chapter. It was around then that I met my wife, Susan, through a personal advertisement in a newspaper. Now, this was long before Match and EHarmony came into existence. We met, we dated, and our relationship took off at warp speed. We just celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary! When we retired, Susan said, ‘I have been hearing about this book for 20 years, you have the time now, finish the darn thing!’ And I did! And it just expanded from there. During my fights with cancer, she was my caregiver out of sheer necessity. I often say that she had to do things that were not in the caregiver’s manual. It has been eight months since my stem cell transplant and I am feeling better every single day. I’m thankful for feeling better, and Susan is thankful she doesn’t have to take care of me anymore.

This is my second battle with cancer after two battles with life-threatening brain surgery and one decade long battle with morbid obesity. In early 2019, I had blood work that showed an anomaly and I was referred to a hematologist. At the time, I didn’t even know what a hematologist was. I went in with a friend who is an assistant director of oncology at my medical center. She was kind enough to volunteer to translate the medical mumbo jumbo (which is what I refer to it as) into layman’s terms. As it turned out, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Thankfully, I was in the early stages. I had nine months of treatment, including an autologous stem cell transplant, and made great progress. I had a treatment of RVD (Revlimid, Velcade, and Dexamethasone). And it worked! I graduated from the bone marrow transplant program at Northside Hospital in Atlanta in November. We came back home, and I have been in remission ever since! Throughout any trials, it is vital to cultivate and maintain a positive attitude. That will take you so, so far in life. For me it has. I have a friend who is a retired cardiologist and after he read my book, he said ‘It’s your positive attitude that helped you get through all your treatments for both cancer diagnoses.’ In my book ‘Overcoming the Odds,’ I write that you have to strike words like ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ and ‘quit’ out of your vocabulary. The best piece of advice I can give anyone, anywhere is, ‘If I can do it, so can you.’ Keep your head up, stay strong, and don’t ever quit.

While the pandemic did not change much for my wife and I, a downside is that we have not been able to get to see our new grandson who was born two months ago up in Boston. We have Facetime calls every Sunday, but it’s just not the same as having met him. We hope to have the chance when things calm down and are moving forward. Other than that, we miss seeing our friends nearby. It’s been tough, but these circumstances are out of our control. We’re just doing the best we can to roll with the punches. We got a new dog to have some excitement in our lives! The newest addition to our family is our adopted dog, Zoe! My wife Susan and I decided that we were tired of looking at our computer screens, and each other. In May, Susan started looking and we found Zoe at the Gwinnett jailhouse dog program. It’s taken me 68 years of my life to have ‘daddy’s little girl.’ She’s a little ten-pound rambunctious ball of fire!