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'A New Lease On Life'

Tribune photo by ANDY JONES

Kim Ruoff looks through dozens of family photos at her Spring Hill home. Ruoff was divorced when the youngest of her three children was 5. A year and a half after that in 1991 she collapsed with multiple sclerosis and spent 10 years in a wheelchair. She raised her three children and earned two masters degrees online. Her M.S. dissappeared, and she now teaches at San Antonio Elementary School.

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By STEVE KORNACKI

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 9, 2008

Updated: 05/09/2008 06:55 pm

SPRING HILL - Getting knocked down isn't what matters. What you do when you're sprawled on the floor does. And if anyone could write a book on that, it's Kim Ruoff.

On this Mother's Day, she could write another kind of book, too. But this one would be a fairy tale, she says.

She's marrying a wonderful guy on Saturday, four days after her 50th birthday. And she'll be walking down the aisle, not rolling in a wheelchair. The illness that left her unable to walk just a few years ago seems to have fled her body.

Her kids turned out pretty good, too, despite being raised by a single mom with multiple sclerosis and being knocked around by their own misfortunes.

Kristin, 26, just got married and is a private duty nurse in Pinellas County. Eric, 23, is a church music worship leader and substitute math teacher in Jacksonville. Alex, 21, was a third-team ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America basketball player this season at West Virginia, leading the Mountaineers to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Her children say their mother has provided them an amazing example of tenacity.

"For her, there is nothing that is impossible to do," Eric says. "She never gives up; she never says no."

Today's blessings seem especially heady when Kim considers the dark valley she and her children spent more than a decade crossing. They were never alone, though. A belief that God would get them through, and that they had each other, made all the difference.

"Six years ago, I was sitting in a wheelchair unable to balance my checkbook," she says. "My memory was affected, and my speech was slurred. Her lungs and other internal organs were also affected.

"It hit me hard, and I wasn't sure I would live to see Alex graduate from high school."

Her youngest was just 3 years old when she and the children's father, Marc Ruoff, divorced. Two years later, she lost her ability to speak and walk within a nightmarish 24 hours. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that scrambles the nervous system.

Though some cases go into remission, sometimes for years, there is no cure.

Kim Ruoff lay in her hospital bed in Cincinnati, planning and worrying. She knew what multiple sclerosis had in store for her - her grandmother had died from it. And she knew the toll it had taken on her own mother, who spent 32 years caring for Kim's stricken grandmother. Kim had full custody of her children, who were still so young. What would become of them when she became too sick to care for them?

She was still in the hospital when a friend sent her a framed Bible verse, Jeremiah 29:11: "For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope."

She Always Had Hope

It became her comfort and beacon. She refused to have a pity party, but says, "I had my moments in the middle of the night." She feared she wouldn't be able to take care of her children. Still, "no matter what I went through, there was always hope."

Eventually, she moved her small brood to Spring Hill to be closer to her parents.

"That way, if I died, my parents could have raised them," she says.

Her speech came back, but her legs didn't. She used a walker and a cane, and then had metal braces attached to her legs from the knees down. She had problems breathing and bladder issues. She started having difficulty swallowing.

"I was working six and seven days a week as a hospice nurse before my body stopped me," she says. "When I was stopped in my tracks, I learned what was important - my family and relationships. Not work or bank accounts. Having MS was the best and worst thing that happened to me."

Kim stopped working in early 1994 and started using a wheelchair in '95. The family lived on Social Security disability benefits.

Being forced to retire allowed her to grow closer to her young children and to serve as an example to them when they experienced their own challenges. Kristin gave birth to a son at 19, an age when she hadn't planned her own future, much less considered a child's. Alex had anger problems that he had to learn to channel.

Her message to each of them was the same: "You can't choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you respond."

How could they question that, coming from her?

She's Grateful, No Matter What

Then Eric received the cruelest blow of all - a crushed disc and degenerative bone disease that ended his tennis career and chances at a scholarship to Florida Southern. His mother slept by his hospital bed for 10 nights after his back surgery. She promised him they'd find a way for him to go to Florida Southern without a tennis scholarship.

They did.

When Kim began to feel unbelievably better in the summer of 2002 and was able to walk again, she gathered her medical records and made an appointment with doctors at Shands HealthCare at the University of Florida. They did a spinal tap, brain scans, took loads of X-rays.

Then a doctor called on Sept. 28, 2002, she says. He told her she was disease-free.

"You have a new lease on life," she says he told her. "Go live it. There was not one patchy white lesion that indicates MS."

Neither physicians from Shands nor Kim's personal physician responded to requests for interviews. So it remains unclear whether Kim was initially misdiagnosed or whether she's experiencing a dramatic remission. Multiple sclerosis is widely described as chronic and incurable.

Kim says she is, simply, grateful. She's working on her second master's degree and abandoned nursing to teach fourth grade at San Antonio Elementary.

"What she's done is just amazing," her son Eric says. "She raised three kids by herself when she was sick."

People tell her she should write a book about her life, she says.

She tells them: "I'm too busy living it."

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