Courage Night - Torch Award Winner - Kathy Miller

Hello, my name is Mary Beth Wolford and I'm a recent new member of Rotary of the Southwest Club here in Eureka. And I had the experience of hearing one of our members, Kathy Miller, give a presentation recently. And sometimes the best presentations come from our very own members. She was totally inspirational as she talked about the challenges of thyroid cancer and discovering that her daughter was a thyroid cancer victim. And I was inspired by the way she took it up to higher levels, helping people in the community that are dealing with the same problem. And I'd like to nominate her for the TORCH Award for the upcoming Courage Night.

Your mom is one of the nominees for the TORCH Awards this year, and she's been nominated for her inspiration in starting a support group. Can you give us a little information about the program you guys have started? It's pretty great and we have a lot of members. And she basically just bakes food and then brings it over. And it's low iodine food because of the special diet you have to go on. And it's really cool and it's helpful. I'm Kathy Miller. I'm the facilitator of the Humboldt Thyroid Cancer Support Group. When Jessie was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, it was particularly difficult to get a diagnosis one, because thyroid cancer is so rare in children that no one expected her to actually have thyroid cancer. So what made you go to the doctor? Oh, I had a volleyball physical. Sports physical. So isn't that amazing because you had a sports physical and they were able to detect that. There was a challenge we found in the process that we really. That I needed to become an advocate for my daughter and for my family. There's something about going through the whole process of diagnosis and preparation for surgery and treatment where you learn so much information about the process and when you come out on the other side, you have so much knowledge, so much information, and then there's almost like nothing to do with it. And a few months after my daughter was done with her treatment, a friend of ours was diagnosed with thyroid cancer as well. And my initial response was oh. And then I went oh. Because I realized that all this information that we had could be of so much help to Niall and Diane. We were able to connect with them and provide all kinds of information that took us, you know, hundreds of hours and numbers of resources to gather. And we were able to bring that with them and share the experience was so healing for us. And it made such a big impact on us to be able to help someone else who struggled like we did that we decided to start the thyroid cancer support group.

Sam.