Cathy shares her story

Cathy and her husband Jim live in an idyllic little burg called Willow Street, Pennsylvania, happily and long retired from the corporate life, and unless you saw her driving down the street and noticed her car’s license plate you probably wouldn’t think twice about the lady behind the wheel.

But when you see the license plate, you’d no doubt wonder who that lady might be.

The plate reads BB CHUMA, and unless you’re fluent in Swahili, you wouldn’t know that the woman behind the wheel proudly bears the nickname “Bibi Chuma” which means “Iron Lady” in Swahili and is what her mountain guide dubbed her after Cathy climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for the second time. 

Climbing mountains is just one of the accomplishments that Cathy and Jim have achieved after stepping away from their long and successful careers in corporate life. Their bucket list has included trips and treks all over the globe, including climbing up to Machu Picchu in Peru, deep-sea diving in the Caribbean and Pacific, balloon rides over the Serengeti Plain in Africa, and bicycle and barge excursions in Europe.  They’ve also worked in trips to Russia and taken a cruise along the Norwegian coast. Cathy’s also run six road races in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

These days, as Cathy has marked her 82^nd birthday and Jim his 90^th, the couple has begun to take their foot off the gas a bit, but when asked about their most recent trips, Jim reminds Cathy that they’ve also been to Iceland.

Since moving to a senior living community about six years ago, Cathy and Jim have become active volunteers at various organizations. Cathy, a former IT executive at a pharmaceutical firm, volunteers at a club that helps people with their computers. “I serve on the club’s executive board,” she says.  “We have a recycle room where we rebuild and refurbish members’ computers at no charge.”

Cathy began noticing that her always good memory had begun to slip a bit.  “I guess it happens to almost all of us,” she says. 

“But you get to a point where you walk into a room and you say, ‘Wait a minute, why did I come here? Little things like that.”

She explains, “I thought, well, they're saying that Prevagen helps with this kind of thing. So I tried it and found that it does.”

For someone who wants to remember to live life to the fullest, that’s a good thing.  Not to mention why those license plates on her car don’t just say IRON LADY.