After a long day or week of work, most people just want to go home and do nothing. In Chris Gillespie’s case, those hours after work and on the weekends are spent volunteering for the Ovarian Cancer Alliance of Ohio. The activities that she is involved with center around working to raise awareness about ovarian cancer and sharing the symptoms with women and men at public or private events.
Chris, along with eight other founding members helped form the OCAO in 2008 when the decision was made to break from the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition and form a new independent organization. Chris served as president of the OCAO for the past 4 years. The goal of the OCAO is to ensure that the voices of Ohio women who were battling this disease and those who had fought and lost would not go unheard. The separation from the NOCC also enabled the organization to expand its contacts and participate in numerous corporate and community health fairs, engage in public speaking, and expand relationships with the treatment centers around central Ohio. At first the founding members spent countless hours around dining room tables in homes and picnic tables in backyards hammering out goals. Now they are trying to determine how many PSA’s they want to run in a year and what type of special they want to run each quarter on TV!
Volunteering with the OCAO was an easy decision for Chris. Her sister Julie was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer in 2000. At the time of her diagnosis, Julie was given very unlikely odds that she would survive 15 months. Five and 1/2 years later, Julie passed away – 2 months shy of her 32nd birthday. Two years into Julie’s diagnosis, their father was given 6 months to live. Twelve years later, he too passed away. “Watching the path my sister walked after her cancer diagnosis and then two years later watching my father receive a similar diagnosis…those things change you. To have the time I have been given with both was a gift.”
Chris’ support system is the other board members and volunteers at the OCAO. All of the members of the OCAO have one goal – to raise awareness about ovarian cancer and ensure that all women understand the signs and symptoms. Her parents were always very supportive. “They have always been willing to listen and give advice. Having lost a child to ovarian cancer they truly understood the importance of what the OCAO was created to do.” Chris’ hero, who rarely gets any press, is her mom. Over the past 13 years her mother has been a caregiver. “She was there for my sister during her diagnosis and she dedicated herself to taking care of my dad during his battle as well. My mother is a saint and I only wish I could be that selfless.”
The best advice Chris would like to give to others is “regardless of how hard something may look, if it is truly something you want, don’t stop trying to achieve it.” For more info on the OCAO, please visit www.ocao.org.