Aaron Cunningham - driven to excel and share

Aaron Cunningham

Aaron Cunningham is a typical high school senior. Athletic, friendly but kind of shy, likes school and is looking forward to college. But what makes him a standout is that he is incredibly generous with his time and talent, giving to Special Olympics kids, helping at a no-kill animal shelter, delivering meals to people in their homes.

Aaron began playing tennis the summer after eighth grade. “I chose tennis because it was an individual sport that challenges you,” Aaron said. “It is a game of patience too.” Aaron plays five to six days a week, and is the captain of his high school tennis team.

The summer after his freshman year, Aaron was looking for opportunities to earn community service hours. He decided to teach tennis to Special Olympics kids, and has done so on Thursday evenings in June and July every summer since.

Besides teaching, Aaron has played in Special Olympics tournaments. The first year, he played with a young man from his school, and they won a gold medal together in a Special Olympics Doubles Tournament. For the past two years, Aaron has worked with a 24-yr-old named Kyle, who has Down Syndrome and a heart problem.

Aaron and Kyle

“Kyle is funny, smart and very kind,” Aaron said, but noted that Kyle has some trouble focusing on multiple tasks. “It has been difficult to teach him how to position his feet and watch the ball at the same time.” Nevertheless, Aaron said, Kyle is easy-going and happy to be on the court having fun.

Aaron shared a story of playing in a doubles tournament on the Plaza with Kyle this past summer. “Kyle was so excited as we waited for our turn to go out on court to play the other teams,” Aaron said. “He was very confident that we were going to win every match in which we didn’t win any matches.” Aaron teaches Kyle tennis, but Kyle teaches Aaron a little bit about life. “It is refreshing to see how people with disabilities like Kyle enjoy things that we take for granted on a daily basis,” Aaron said. “He makes you realize what is really important in this world. He is a true friend.”

Aaron has had to learn how to temper his own style of play to teach the Special Olympics kids. He said that slowing down from his natural competitive pace so that he can break down the basic tennis moves is a challenge. “I play without thinking,” Aaron said. “It is hard to stop and think about what I am doing, so that I can teach others.”

 

Besides tennis, another interest of Aaron’s is working with his family for Furry Kids Refuge, a no-kill animal shelter. They have fostered homeless pets at various times for the past seven years. Aaron and his younger sister, Casey, also go to a local pet store on Saturday mornings when they can to help with adoptions.

Aaron’s other gift of time is delivering meals during the summer for One Good Meal, a Lee’s Summit not-for-profit whose mission is to deliver hot meals to seniors and those who are homebound regardless of income.

All this is in addition to working toward an International Baccalaureate diploma. Aaron is required to take college classes in high school, earn 150 hours community service, do a community service project, write a 4000-word extended essay, and take a “Theory of Knowledge” class before school each morning for one year. “I will have approximately 40 hours college credit when I graduate from high school,” Aaron said. He plans to be a chemical engineer. He also squeezes in time to go to Kansas City Royals games and spend family time in North Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Aaron is driven by the desire to be the best he can be, but he balances that with generosity. “Giving back to others is a big part of our family life whether it is people or animals,” Aaron said. On a personal note, he added, “I get the satisfaction of doing the right thing for others while learning various life lessons from different perspectives.”

Ron Dillon - learning a new way of hearing

Ron Dillon has a pragmatic view of life. Were he to participate in a “Finding Your Strengths” study, he would probably find that adaptability was one of his top traits.

Ron Dillon

He is in the field of mergers and acquisitions, meaning he helps people buy and sell businesses. He started his own company with his son, Rick, in 1990, after trying to buy the company Rick worked for. When that merger and acquisition company wouldn’t sell, Ron said, they decided to create their own, and the Dillon Group was born.

Entering into such negotiations means that being able to hear is crucial. Ron has dealt with hearing loss since his 30s, and has been through eight or 10 pairs of hearing aids through the years. When he learned about cochlear implants, he wondered if such an implant would help him. “If I didn’t get some help, I would have to retire,” Ron said. And at age 78, he wasn’t ready to consider retirement. So, the man who was born on the same day Franklin Roosevelt took office paid a visit to a doctor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. “I went in for a test just to see if it would help me hear,” he said.

His hearing loss was in part because of genetics on his father’s side. Environmental noise might also have been a cause, Ron said, because he spent a lot of hours on a tractor when he was younger. He was also exposed to some degree of loud noise while serving in the Army Corps of Engineers in a supply depot in Pusan at the end of the Korean War. How he lost his hearing is somewhat immaterial at this point. But being able to hear conversation is significant.

A cochlear implant is an option for people who are profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing, and in the past was only offered for those who had lost more than 95 percent of their hearing. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear, and a second portion that is surgically implanted under the skin. Rather than amplify sounds like a hearing aid, a cochlear device bypasses damaged portions of the ear to directly stimulate the auditory nerve. In essence, it requires learning a whole new way of hearing, of processing sounds.

Ron had the implant about 18 months ago, and is more than halfway through the typical three-year adjustment period of learning how to hear with the device. It’s a trial and error situation, with adjustments based in large part on what the person with the implant tells the technician through the testing. But it’s impossible to tell if the adjustment helps or hinders until you get back out in the world and try conversing with people in different situations. With Ron, the latest adjustment didn’t help. “I sat around a table the other night, there were four of us, and I couldn’t understand one thing they were saying,” Ron said. “There was too much of an echo with the implant.”

So Ron will visit the doctor again to enhance the latest adjustment and try for a different outcome. But he feels like he’s getting closer to where he wants to be, and has no regrets about going this route. “With hearing aids,” he said, “I would get less than 50 percent word recognition. I get in the high 80s with the cochlear.”

Ron is mostly patient during this long process. Perhaps he’s learned that art through life circumstances. He and his first wife, Sharon, had four children by birth. When their oldest child was 13, they found themselves taking in a 17-year-old boy, at the request of a family friend, who desperately needed care and love. Ron said that boy blended quite easily into their family. Then came two and three-year-old siblings, a boy and girl, who lived off and on with the Dillons over the next 20 or so years, returning to them each time things fell apart with their birth parents. Ron still keeps in contact with the siblings, though Sharon died 25 years ago from cancer. In fact, just recently Ron tried to impart some words of wisdom to his adopted daughter, when she wrote to tell him that she and her spouse were fighting constantly, mostly about money. Ron’s advice: “Next time that comes up sit down together and review your checkbook. If you find that your fighting has increased the funds in your account then by all means keep on fighting, but if it has not then you have proven that fighting did not help so stop it, put your arms around each other and pray or dance or do something to release the tension.”

After Sharon’s death, Ron didn’t remain a widower for long. Upon the advice of a friend who was entering his fifth marriage, Ron placed an ad in the “singles” section of a newspaper. But he did so in jest, stating he was a wino living in a cardboard box looking for the right person. “I just wanted to see who would answer,” Ron said. Apparently, a certain woman named Marjorie picked up on that sense of humor and responded. Ron said they knew in about three weeks that they were going to marry. They celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary in May.

Ron’s oldest son, the 17-year-old he and Sharon took in, passed away several years ago from cancer. He has also lost his youngest brother, two brothers-in-law and a sister-in-law all to cancer. But such is life. “You accept the challenges as they come along,” Ron said, which is also his attitude about his hearing loss. “And when I look back, I’ve had so many blessings.”

Ruthi Ostgulen - a fight against breast cancer

For most of us, life is routine. We follow the same daily and weekly schedules, and the days and the weeks pass. But then one day, perhaps you fall and break a leg, or your job changes, or you face an impending move. Or maybe, like Ruthi Ostgulen, you find a lump in your breast.

Ruthi Ostgulen

But a lump could be nothing, right? Ruthi hoped so, and since she had recently had a clear mammogram, thought she would just ignore it and continue on with her life.

“But then I kept hearing ‘breast cancer,’ ‘breast cancer,’ breast cancer,’” Ruthi said, referring to a sudden awareness of stories in the news and other conversation. So she decided she would visit the doctor, get some peace of mind.

The doctor’s visit led to an ultrasound, then a biopsy, then a few tense days of waiting for the results. Ruthi was back at the doctor’s office, last October 15, when he came in and said, “The bad news is it’s cancer. The good news is I think it’s small and can be treated.” That’s not the news Ruthi had expected to hear. “I was in shock,” she said. “I was always healthy, never had any issues.”

Suddenly Ruthi had to make choices without much medical knowledge, and certainly no experience.  The first decision was whether to have a lumpectomy or mastectomy. Prayer and reflection led her to opt for the lumpectomy. That went well, she thought. But then came the pathology report, showing more cancerous tissue. Once again, she had a choice to make. Further lumpectomy, single or double mastectomy?  “There are all these huge decisions you have to make in a short amount of time,” Ruthi said. “But how do you make that decision?” For her, each decision could mean life or death, and a drastic physical change.  

Ruthi spoke to a young mom at Holy Cross who had just been through this. Afterwards, and after more prayer and reflection, she felt confident that a double mastectomy was the way to go.  She had surgery after Thanksgiving, and again thought it went okay. Ruthi said the doctor used a super glue, so that she didn’t have big staples, or even a wrapping of bandages.

Because Ruthi’s diagnosis was a fast-growing cancer which had spread to the lymph nodes, she had more treatment to endure. Chemotherapy started January 4, once a week for 16 weeks, about three hours of her day. She took anti-nausea medicine, but still needed a long weekend to recover and get her strength back before returning to work on Monday. A side effect, she knew, would be hair loss, including eyebrows and eyelashes. “My hair started coming out in clumps,” she said. So she decided to shave her head.

All along, Ruthi had the support of her husband and a friend/neighbor who she describes as wonderful, along with family, friends and co-workers. Meals, cards, conversations, shared tears, weekly chemo goodie bags. But for the head shaving, she was joined on her front porch by her husband, son Erik and a close friend, all of whom shaved their heads with her. Her son in El Dorado and brother-in-law in Albuquerque, New Mexico, also shaved their heads that day long distance.

When Ruthi’s chemo treatments ended, radiation began. Five days a week for six weeks. “My skin peeled, like a sunburn,” Ruthi said. But finally came the July day when treatment ended, and Ruthi could start trying to return to a semblance of what her life had been, before she got caught up in the whirlwind of a cancer diagnosis. Sadly, too, during this time, she had to deal with the tragic death of her brother in a plane crash.

“Looking back, this seems like a bad dream,” Ruthi said. “But then I look in the mirror.” Her hair is growing back in, a salt and pepper look, and maybe she’ll decide to color it, and maybe she won’t. Reconstructive surgery, she says, seems unnecessary right now, especially since it would mean having to endure more time in a hospital, recovery and rehabilitation. 
Those things aren’t a priority for her. But she knows what is. “I want to spend more time with my kids (five of them) and grandkids (10 of those),” she said. “I want to do things again to help others.”

Ruthi is participating in a clinical trial through the University of Kansas Medical Center, where her weeks of treatment will be studied and compared. She faces five years of visits with her oncologist and ten years of follow-up with the clinical trial. She would be more than willing to offer advice and share her experience with someone else newly diagnosed with breast cancer.

And then there’s her faith. Ruthi has become intimately acquainted with God through the ordeal of this past year. “You cry, ‘where are you, God,’ and then you see he’s right here,” she said, explaining how each day’s devotion was exactly what she needed that moment, or the hug of a friend brought comfort, or another card in the mail let her know she was on someone’s mind. “I felt God though this a lot.” And that’s what she would want someone else to know, “God is there, and He will get you through it.”