Letter From The Editor

Screen Shot 2017-02-27 at 10.12.49 AMWhen Christa Wittmier thinks about the time last May when she was given a prognosis of just six months to live (she’s already nearly doubled that), she thinks about how she felt in that moment.

“You think that it would be something that would make you kind of cower and be sad. But I just remember sitting up straighter, and smiling at (my doctor) and saying, ‘Come on, do you think I have six months to live?'”

Wittmier approached the dismal prognosis with her trademark optimism. But she also readily admits that it has not been easy. As you probably know, she retired from her day job a couple months ago, and has taken a step back in other facets of her life. Things are looking up again — she’s made huge improvement since May — but it’s not perfect. Most days, she says, she feels fine. But every day is different, and there was one day last week that she couldn’t even get out of bed. And there’s the fact that she has to be careful when touching other people — just in case they have been exposed to a bacteria or infection.

“I don’t have the immune system to fight that, and then guess what I am in the hospital and I might die,” Wittmier says. “It’s weird, I feel so fragile.”

But these are things that Wittmier never seems to dwell on for long. She instead says that she actually spends a lot of time feeling really lucky.

She feels lucky, she explains, because there’s a reason that this is happening to her: She’s a storyteller. She can share here story.

And that’s exactly what she’s been up to lately.

You can read more about what that entails on page 4.