THE LAST WORD
JEN N Y A HLST RO M
TO MAKE GREAT CHANGE A MULTIPLE MYELOMA SURVIVOR FINDS HEALING IN SERVING OTHERS BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S
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ith her family by her side, Jenny Ahlstrom has spent 11 years pushing far beyond the confines of her comfort zone, learning skills and undertaking challenges for which she never felt prepared. At 54, the Sandy, Utah, wife and mother of six hopes she’ll have years more to experience new firsts. That dream started with cancer. The Ahlstrom family had moved to Mexico, where her husband, Paul, an entrepreneur and startup expert, had been asked to help create a venture capital industry. While on vacation back in the United States, she saw a doctor about physical complaints she’d pushed to the background during the busy, exciting time. The news was devastating: She had holes throughout her spine and pelvis — probably cancer. Specialists soon provided a name. The then-43-year-old had multiple myeloma, a relatively rare form of blood cancer that typically strikes people in their 70s. Back then, few lived longer than two years. She spent the next six months in America undergoing tandem stem cell transplants using her own healthy cells, while family and friends rallied so Paul and the kids could stay in Mexico. He traveled back and forth to be with her when she was sickest. Then she moved back to Mexico and
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traveled periodically to Houston for treatments. After months of that, they moved back to the United States. Somewhere in that chaos, they decided to approach the cancer diagnosis like a startup company and create something unique, a foundation to see if they could help researchers find a cure using a database platform and software suite they call HealthTree. The myeloma portion is MyelomaCrowd by HealthTree and they plan to add coverage for other diseases, like acute myeloid leukemia. Deseret Magazine asked Jenny Ahlstrom what she’s learned about building resources for patients and researchers and if a potentially deadly disease can bring welcome lessons. WHAT MADE YOUR FAMILY TACKLE THIS SO DIFFERENTLY?
My brother-in-law David was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia six years prior to my diagnosis. He lived a year, and it was a terrible year. Everybody jumped in to help — we were helping fix his house so he could come back, we were helping in his care, we were sitting by him in the hospital because his medication gave him hallucinations. We were all in but we weren’t all in in the right way, I think. We didn’t know how to navigate it. P O RT RAI T BY R ANDY GLASS
