Battling illness, she’s in charge of her own story
Cynthia Dawn Clevenger, a kidney cancer survivor, works as a community relations specialist for the Galveston Bay Estuary Program.
“I have this weird autoimmune illness that the doctors have never really been able to figure out. My case has been written up in several medical journals because it’s so strange.
“Years of medication and what have you affected my kidneys, and I had another kidney surgery a couple of years ago. That kicked my autoimmune illness into overdrive, and one of the things that happened is my hair fell out. A lot of people see me and think that I’m going through chemotherapy.
“I’m pretty private when it comes to all of that. At work, you don’t want to be seen as the sickly person. But when you start having to take off weeks at a time and you’re always in the hospital, at some point you have to let people know what’s going on.
“When this thing happened with my hair, I couldn’t hide it. It was very devastating at first. That’s when I panicked and started thinking, people are going to know that something’s wrong and I’m going to have to tell them.
“Because I’m a communications person, I wanted to be in charge of my own story. So I’ve come up with a quick and easy thing to say about it all. Sometimes I feel like I’m putting out my own little press release.”
— Cynthia Dawn Clevenger
(Note: Cynthia Dawn Clevenger passed away on Jan. 26, 2022.)
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