My Goal is to Live Forever: So Far, So Good

When Kathy Jones learned she had leukemia, she had one wish: to see her seven-year-old, the last of her four children, graduate from high school. Now 17, daughter Abby will graduate next year. As it gets closer, Kathy's goal has changed. Now she wants to see her grandchildren-all of them.

"I've already gotten ten extra years," jokes Kathy, "but there are so many things I'd like to see and do. Now I'm feeling that meeting just one grandchild, when it happens, won't be enough."

Diagnosed in 1992 at age 41 with chronic myelogenous leukmia (CML), Kathy was living a busy and full but routine life. She was the mother of four children ranging from seven to fifteen, the wife of a cattle and crop farmer, and a substitute teacher. The diagnosis was shocking. The family had to triage life.

"My husband, David, told me that he'd handle everything else, my job was to get better," says Kathy. "He turned out to be the Rock of Gibraltar."

Getting better, it turned out, meant that Kathy would need an allogeneic bone marrow transplant-receiving bone marrow from a well-matched donor. Her five siblings were tested and two were perfect matches. It was decided that her sister Karen would be her donor. Kathy considers her first transplant fairly easy, having had few side effects from the chemotherapy and radiation. She began to feel better quickly and felt fully recovered in eighteen months.

In 1996, the leukemia was back. Karen again donated her bone marrow to Kathy and the second time things were tougher. But this transplant has stuck. She passed her five-year mark last year.

"I went through a period of time where I wondered why it happened to me and I finally decided that it was a pointless thing, it happens to who it happens to," says Kathy. "A minister helped a lot by telling me it was okay to be mad at God."

To ensure that it wouldn't consume her life, Kathy set an appointed time each day, three o'clock, to feel sorry for herself. She ranted.

It helped.

"When my mind wandered during the day to the difficult stuff, I knew I had my time to deal with it at 3 - to get it out of my system," she says.

David promised her that he would be mother and father to the kids if she died, but one of the most emotionally painful parts of Kathy's diagnosis was remembering what her own young life was like when she lost her own father to cancer when she was eight years old.

"I understood better than most what lay ahead for them if I did not survive." It was then that she made it her goal to see Abby graduate. But she also wanted to do something for her children in case she did not survive.

She decided to write three letters to each of her children, which they would get upon graduating high school, getting married and having their first child. Since Abby was only seven, Kathy wrote an additional letter to her, to be opened upon entering junior high.

It took her a summer to write all the letters. And then she put them in a safety deposit box at the bank.

"They were really hard to write," says Kathy. "A nice thing is that many of them have been opened already. One of my children is even married, so that grandma thing might happen sooner rather than later."

As the children grew and thrived, Kathy became aware that she didn't want to spend any more of her time doing things she didn't want to do. She had survived, and well enough to have her own mid-life crisis. She had never liked substitute teaching.

"But I loved a digital camera I had gotten," she says.

At 50, Kathy decided to go to the local community college to learn more about what she could do with it. She became a certified Internet web designer. Now she has her own business designing web sites for anyone who hires her.

"It's a small business-it supports my software habit," says Kathy. "I truly love it." "The bone marrow transplants affected my life in every way. I am thankful to wake up every morning. I have learned compassion and empathy for those unable to be normal. I have learned not to spend time worrying about little unimportant things. I have learned to appreciate sunrises and sunsets. I have learned what it means when others are kind. I have learned the value of my family in my life, and just how precious life is, and how much I want to live it," says Kathy.

Kathy has had a paper on her refrigerator for the last five years that reads: my goal is to live forever.

"So far, so good," she says.

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