Bob Furness shares the transformative journey of his daughter Keesha, who battled stage four breast cancer from age 30 until her death at 34, and how her story inspired his book “On The Blue” and the Warrior Princess Foundation.
• Keesha was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer at just 30 years old after being misdiagnosed with asthma
• As a child with ADD, Keesha struggled with multi-tasking, but this became her “superpower” during cancer treatment as she hyper-focused on survival
• Bob created meaningful experiences by placing events on Keesha’s calendar every few weeks, giving her goals to anticipate
• The Warrior Princess Foundation encourages fathers to talk to daughters about breast health and self-examinations
• Early detection is crucial – breast cancer found at stage zero or one has a 97-98% survival rate
• The book title “On To Blue” carries three meanings: a story reference, Keesha’s favorite beach, and the blue of heaven
For more information or to support the foundation, visit warriorprincess.org or ontobluebook.com.
Transcript:
Speaker 1:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt or worry and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, sylvia Worsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, sylvia Worsham.
Speaker 3:
Hey, lightbringers, it’s Sylvia Worsham. Welcome to Released Out Revealed Purpose. And today is Bob Furness, and he is the author of On the Blue, and he’s got an amazing, very heartwarming story to share about his daughter who unfortunately passed away from stage four breast cancer. But her legacy lives on through Bob and his work and through his book. So, without further ado, bob, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.
Speaker 2:
Thank you for having me, Sylvia. It’s great to be here.
Speaker 3:
It’s a pleasure having you and I know you have an amazing story to share. There’s a lot of grief there and we want to dive deep into this because there’s people that have lost children and they’ve lost children in ways that can be devastating and can keep them stuck. But it sounds like you have done something very powerful, written a book called on the blue and, without further ado, can you share with us your story of transformation.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, when we talk about a story of transformation, well, she definitely transformed my life, and I wear a bracelet every day called it says on it Live Like Keisha. The book is a story of her transformation. She was a little girl that struggled with ADD when she was growing up and when she got cancer. She became one of the strongest women that I’ve ever known in my life and she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer at just 30 years old and she lived until she was 34. So she made it four years before cancer took her life, but during that time she was the epitome of a warrior.
Speaker 2:
I can remember just story after story, and probably the toughest part of writing the book was leaving things out that came to mind or writing about something and then deciding that it really didn’t fit into the narrative. But writing the book was transformative in that it was therapeutic to write about her. I started out writing a book about what I learned from my kids in life and it sort of morphed into what I learned from her. There are a couple of really cool stories in the book about my son and what he’s taught me, and he continues to teach me. He’s now a dad with three young kids that are by far the cutest and the best three kids in the world, as you can imagine from this grandfather. But the book is primarily about her life and what she went through. And then I face it back to me as a father and to my wife, susan, as a mother, and what we learned from her as we were going through that journey.
Speaker 3:
Wonderful, I mean, and do share with us her story of transformation, that warrior of light because she was and it sounds like she was a warrior of light. Tell us more about her journey, how she discovered the breast cancer, what things you did as parents to kind of guide her through that.
Speaker 2:
So that’s sort of a tough question, because what we know is there was an opportunity that she missed and it was only found in stage four. It was found because she was having trouble breathing and I was actually out of town and my wife took her to the emergency room and thinking that there was something wrong with her lungs. And and there was. There was metastasized breast cancer in her lungs and she’d been being treated for asthma. So she, she went to the doctor, but the doctor wasn’t looking at breast cancer because she was only 30 years old and and and that’s the reason why we have the non-profit, which I’ll talk about in a little bit but, um, she, she just we discovered the breast, the breast cancer. One of the things that we did early on was so she came back, I came back, I flew back in that night. It was at night when they found that I flew back from California overnight, and very early in that she began to talk about the responsibility for missing what she missed, and I very quickly said look, it doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what we’re going to do with where we are and what we’re going to do going forward. And while we talked about how we got there later in the four years and several times, many times, over the last year of her life, because she wanted us to tell the story so that other women didn’t go through what she went through and other parents didn’t go through what we went through. But you know, it’s important that women pay attention to breast health.
Speaker 2:
And so while she was sick, she lived her life out loud on social media. There’s still a Facebook page that exists for her. That was all the things that she lived out loud on. She was in a couple of metastatic programs, mentoring programs, where she would talk with women who were first diagnosed about her experience and so her warrior-like attitude. She went from being that little girl have you ever had your child fall down and scratch their knee? And they just scream, but they don’t make any noise. And you would think that when you get over to them that their kneecap is going to be stuck outside their knee and they were going to have to go to the emergency room and she would fall down and do that and she would scream without making noise, and I would go over to her and I would go. I don’t, I don’t see anything. I’m sorry, sweetheart, You’re okay, you just, it just hurts, You’re going to be okay.
Speaker 2:
And then when she became, when she was diagnosed, she became this person that was just stronger than reality. I sometimes had to remind her that it’s okay to have a bad day, it’s okay to have days where you’re not okay, and often the reason she was doing that was she didn’t want us to feel bad as parents. Or she wouldn’t tell her friend exactly how bad she was because she didn’t want them to feel bad. But when she found out about it it was already in multiple places in her body. So we knew that stage four we don’t typically talk about terminal cancer in America anymore, but stage four has a very low uh, of course we went to Dr Google and found out all the, all the bad things about it and how bad it was. And, um, she knew how sick she was.
Speaker 2:
But we didn’t focus on that. We focused on what can we do and we actually I actually, as a father, I couldn’t do anything to fix it. You know, as a dad, you can change a lot of things. You can. She gets in a bad marriage, she can come home and stay with us. If she gets in a bad relationship, a dating relationship I’ll go and punch the guy in the nose. Dating relationship I’ll go and punch the guy in the nose, Like like there was a lot of stuff that you can do as a dad, but I couldn’t fix breast cancer.
Speaker 2:
I just I just couldn’t fix it and, um, it was. But what I could do was put things in front of her. So we had a bucket list and there was something on her calendar about every three to four weeks and in the book I talk about that. I think that when somebody reaches that time in their life when they’re very, very sick and you know that there’s time is coming to put things in front of them, we would walk out of Disney World and she would go in three weeks I get to see Luke Bryan. Or we would walk out of a Luke Bryan concert and she would go in three weeks we’re going to California, and what I could do was put that in front of her. But her warrior-ness was her ability to deal with it. And I’ll let you ask another question, because I’m talking really long to short questions.
Speaker 3:
No, it’s. You know, I allow, like when people want to answer a certain way. I allow it because our hearts are led to answer. Like I stated before we started the interview, we allow the free flow because sometimes we’re led, sometimes our, our people that have gone beyond this have a special message they want to share and they go through us and we’re the messengers. Or sometimes, you know, in my case I, sometimes the Holy Spirit, has something to say and I just allow and I say what I need to say, and so there’s no rhyme or reason.
Speaker 3:
I’m loving the fact that you could put one goal in front of her and that’s important to to say, especially for people whose time is coming up. It’s also the experiences. I believe wholeheartedly, because I lived it with my father’s journey, that every stage has its beautiful moments, embedded in with the painful realization that their time is coming to an end. But it’s those moments of joy that will always live with us, no matter how long they’ve been gone. You can always go back into your heart and into your mind and remember the joy on their faces in that concert.
Speaker 3:
Or the last Christmas. In my case, I have pictures that I documented of my father’s last Christmas and just the simple moments that escape us sometimes because we’re so busy doing and being that we’re not enjoying. Even in the pain, even in the grief, there’s love and there’s joy. In the grief there’s love and there’s joy, and I love that you guys gave her those moments, those bucket list items that are so important, because sometimes we get so caught up in the disease itself that we stop to like, we stop enjoying life. We just, some people, just end up ending right then and there, because their spirit dies with them immediately.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, no, she was Her spirit. She was a spirit. I think I mentioned in my note to you when we were talking about doing this podcast that she grew up with ADD and not ADHD. She wasn’t hyper, but very young. We struggled with things like you would go into her room and say, okay, it’s time to go to school, put on your socks and shoes, put your books in your bag and meet me in the car in five minutes, and whenever I did that, that meant I gave her too many things to do because she could only do one at a time, and so, as a dad, I had to learn that she was technically diagnosed when she was in the seventh grade, based on a book that I read called Driven to Distraction, and what was weird is that I saw myself in the book and I actually believe that some of my success in life is as a result of my ADD.
Speaker 2:
It’s not unusual for me to have 50 tabs open on my browser. Now I read the articles that say that you can’t multitask and you’re not doing things well when you’re multitasking, but I believe that that has been some of my strength, and what was interesting to me about her was that and I talk about this story in the book is that her ADD became her superpower when she got sick, because the one thing that she focused on was living another day, another week, another month and it was her, it was her primary thing, that that she focused on. And and I look back of all the times in her life, that ADD was a problem. When she got into college she said, look, the medicine makes me feel weird, I’m not going to take it anymore. And you know we, we would see the the results of that. But we, we, you know we would see the results of that. But we, you know, we allowed or we agreed that it was her decision as an adult whether she should take it or not, but we definitely saw the difference.
Speaker 2:
But it became her superpower to only focus on one thing and that was living. Only focus on one thing and that was living. I can remember one time she was talking to the oncologist who became sort of like a grandfather in her life. They saw each other so often over those four years and Dr Schwartzberg became almost like this grandfather relationship and they were talking about what medicine she was on and she always ended the conversation with him by saying so if this doesn’t work, what’s the next option? And so, even in the times when she was talking to an oncologist about what was about to happen was talking to an oncologist about what was about to happen, excuse me. She was always focused on how do I? How do I? What’s next? What if this doesn’t work? Or if this only works for a short amount of time, what’s next? So she was just just so full of life and so full of wanting to live just so full of life and so full of wanting to live.
Speaker 3:
I love you know.
Speaker 3:
It does remind me of the hyper-focus ability of ADD children, because I myself have ADD and my daughter and my son. My son has the ADHD version, which is more common in boys, but the ADD is definitely the common one in girls and my girl just got diagnosed in November of this past year and the hyper-focus is really a superpower, Like when you zero in on one thing. We have the amazing capacity to really see a project through because nothing stops us and we are this tenacious individual and some people think like that’s just so opposite of what you see an ADD child do, but we can. We can have this amazing capacity and it sounds wonderful that she did put that in.
Speaker 3:
What is even more wonderful is that, as a father, you focused on what you could do because as provider, and protector it is within your dna to want to fix things and there’s men and I’ve seen, I’ve read so many books on it and it it took me a while to learn that particular um idea of men. It must be the most hard thing to do so. As a father, can you give some tips to fathers that may be journeying in this stage right now, with their girls having a diagnosis that they cannot fix what? What would you, what tips would you guide them on?
Speaker 2:
So the first thing is time. I took some time off. My, my CEO and my company at the time called me and said, bob, shut your laptop and take as much time as you need with your family. So I was very blessed and very lucky for that to happen, to work in a company that was like that, but I did go back to work Eventually. She was sick for four years, and so the number one thing I would say is time. You don’t have as much time as you think you do, and so find ways to spend time with whoever in your life is at this stage or in a stage where they’re very ill. Find time.
Speaker 2:
The second thing is to record and capture who she was and who she is. I talked about having a company come in and, like a reporter, come in and do a sort of a I don’t know a Dateline story about her or a story about her life, and we never did it and I wish I had, although now I’ve written the book, so I guess it still happened. But number two is that. Number three is to just love them where they are. I talk in the book about the platinum rule of loving people the way they want to be loved, and what a diagnosis like that will do is. It will put everything in your life in question.
Speaker 2:
So she was 30 years old. She had 30 years of life before and everything that I did every time I yelled at her and thought about it, every time I was less than what I should have been as a dad or what I should have done better, came into question, because I knew that there was a limited amount of time that she was going to be on earth and so, instead of going back and hanging out in that spot, just take those that time that you have and make up for it, and you can overcome whatever you’ve done. That you know. I’m confident that my daughter knew I loved her unconditionally, but there were times when she had ADD and whenever she was who she was, you know I wanted her to be a cool kid and that just wasn’t her. She wasn’t the cool kid.
Speaker 2:
So I’ll say to fathers who have a daughter or son now that’s a little different, a little unusual, not the cool kids, but they have their own self-worth. It’s to love them the way they are, love them who they are, love them for what they are and because when you, when you, if you ever get into this situation, all of the things that you wanted fade away to the one thing that’s left, which is love for her. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:
Yes, absolutely, and it’s really resonating with me because I have two of those kids, you know, and we, unfortunately society kind of pushes an idea that they’ve got to be this way or they’re not successful or they’re not worthy and it’s very subliminal and it’s everywhere.
Speaker 3:
And we fall trapped to it as parents If we come from like, a high achieving background and you’re constantly checking off boxes. I know I did and I fell trapped to that and I caught myself wanting her to have a better life than I did because I didn’t want her to fall into the same traps I did. But that’s like every parent’s wish. Yeah, I mean, we all want that.
Speaker 2:
I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t work from a checklist. Like I do everything, I have a to-do list for my to-do list and I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t work from a to-do list. But the reality is is that’s just not the way her brain was wired. Her brain was wired to do things as they come up, as she thinks about them, and so, as a dad who’s either going through it or even if you’re not going through it and you’re listening to this as a dad, do that and then, secondarily, as a dad, is a move towards the nonprofit there was. There was a, so what started the nonprofit was that I wrote an article to the Commercial Appeal, which is the local newspaper here in Memphis, Tennessee, and it was entitled the Question that Every Dad Should Ask His Daughter, and so I was asking my daughter are you being careful when you get in the daughter? Are you being careful when you get in the car? Are you being careful when you walk in the parking lot? Do you have gas in the car? But I never asked her are you going to the gynecologist and are you doing breast self-exams? I didn’t ask her a lot about her health in general and what I realized although I don’t take and I don’t feel responsible for her death, but I do realize that if I had done those things, then it’s possible that she would have found it at stage one or stage two and she might still be here. You should ask your daughter is is she going to the gynecologist or talking to her healthcare provider about her breast health, and is she doing self-checks? Now, a lot of times when I talk to a group of dads about that, I’ll have one dad come up to me afterwards and go dude, there’s no way I’m going to talk to my daughter about her breast health. That’s not happening. That’s her mom’s job. And so I hand him one of our cards that’s available on our website. That has a shower card that hangs in the shower and it has the information on the back of how to do a breast exam and the icons on the front, and I hand it to him and I say so here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to just tell her that you were listening to this guy speak about his daughter and you’re going to tell her that it’s really important that she do these things and you’re going to hand this to her, and then she’s going to come back to you and go, dad, I’m doing it or I’m not doing it, or you’re going to wait a couple of weeks and you’re going to say, hey, that thing I gave you, have you been to the doctor yet? It’s that simple, and I’ve told that story so many times.
Speaker 2:
And how I knew that story mattered was I was in a bar in Boston, I was working in Boston and I got through early and realized that Cheers Bar was a couple of blocks away. So I walked over to the Cheers Bar and sat at the bar and it was very much like everybody knows your name kind of environment, because a husband and wife sat down beside me and we struck up a conversation which is not typically my major, typically my major. And then this was about four months, five months after Keisha died, and the wife asked me a question. She said so, how many kids do you have? And there was this blur of information running around in my brain Do I tell her one my son and let the other one go? Or do I tell her the Keisha? And if I tell her two, what am I going to say about our daughter? So I decided that I was going to say two, because that’s how many kids I had and I told her.
Speaker 2:
And then I told her the story that I’m telling now about Keisha, and she looked at her husband. Her husband looked at her and said we have two daughters in their mid 20s and I don’t know, do either of them go to the gynecologist and are either of them doing breast exams? And the wife said I don’t know, but by the end of the day, before I go to sleep, I bet I know that answer and you will too. And as I got in the Uber or the taxi and was on the way to the airport, it occurred to me that’s it, that’s the nonprofit. Just take her story and talk to young women. Take her story and other young women’s stories.
Speaker 2:
There’s multiple stories on our website about women who have found something in their 30s and then found something and went to the doctor. The doctors almost always say oh, you’re too young for breast cancer. I’m sure it’s nothing. And sometimes it is nothing, and that’s what we want it to be. We want you to check and then find nothing. But sometimes it is something, and what’s important is to find it in its early stages, Because if you find it in stage zero or stage one, it actually has about a 97, 98% survival rate, and so it’s very important to find it early. She didn’t find it until she was in her fourth stage, which was in multiple places throughout her body.
Speaker 3:
You know, and that leads me to that question, because what you’ve discussed is the purpose that you now live out through your charity work and this charity and through the book. Is this a permanent purpose? And we now know how you discovered it.
Speaker 2:
So the question is yeah, I think it’s a permanent purpose. I think that my board, my nonprofit board, asked me recently for the second time so what happens when you die, Bob? Are we going to be able to keep this going? And I said, well, we would have to have somebody to take over what my wife and I do. So it is something that I it may morph a little bit, and if we put somebody in charge of the nonprofit besides my wife and I, it will definitely morph a little bit. But our purpose is to ensure that parents don’t go through what we’ve been through. And the purpose of my daughter telling me to please tell my story, dad, was I don’t want anybody to go through what you and mom have gone through and I don’t want anyone to go through what I’ve gone through.
Speaker 3:
That’s a pretty strong purpose yes, that’s something that you get up every day and you yeah you get it done because she asks you to. And she, our warrior of light, is still speaking from where she’s at yes, she is oh, in peace. Peace and no longer in pain. And that gives solace to the degree you know, but I love her. I love the charity On the blue. How can people reach you, Bob, if they want to get a copy of the book or maybe help?
Speaker 2:
with your charity.
Speaker 2:
So if they want to visit the charity, they can go to warriorprincessorg just warriorprincessorg. It’s really simple. If they want to find out more about the book, they can go to ontobluecom ontobluebook sorry, ontobluebookcom, and just those words bookcom and um, just those wordscom. And if they want to join us on uh Facebook or on Instagram, where we post from time to time, they can look up uh warrior princess or Keisha warrior princess, and they’ll find us on there. Um, go to ontobluebookcom. It has contact information for me, direct on email on Facebook. It has our Instagram and our Twitter account, so you can find me If you look up Bob Furness. I’m in a lot of places on the internet, so you can find me.
Speaker 2:
I appreciate that, Bob the internet so you can find me. I appreciate that, bob. And for the oh and. And the book is available on amazon. Sorry, I didn’t interrupt you. The book is available on amazon if you, if you do a search on on the blue on the blue, on to blue on to blue. There’s a really cool story about that. Probably don’t have time to tell it, but I’ll leave that for someone to read. But there’s a really cool story I didn’t get that there’s a real internet is it reachable?
Speaker 2:
alexa, stop, sorry about that okay there’s a really cool story about that and that’s the name of the book, but it has three meanings. It has the meaning of the story, it has the meaning of the beach and the blue beach, which was her favorite place in the world, and it has the blue of heaven, which I’m confident is where she is today.
Speaker 3:
Oh, I’m more than confident she’s there. I’ve felt lots of confirmations throughout the podcast interviews, so this is definitely in line with what she wanted and what God wants for the message to be. So thank you, bob, for joining us, for being vulnerable and sharing your beautiful story and the story of your beautiful daughter.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:
It was a pleasure having you and for the listeners, of Released Out Reveal Purpose. Remember Matthew 5.14, be the light. Have a wonderful week, stay safe. Love you all. Bye now.
Speaker 1:
So that’s it for today’s episode of Released Out Reveal Purpose. Head on over iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in grand prize drawing to win a 25 000 private vip day with sylvia worship herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.