If there is a positive to such adversity, it is that you find out how caring people can be in times of need.
When Sanford needed help to meet the financial obligations associated with his treatment, that duo, along with football secretary Rita Griffith, rallied to the cause. They got the University of Kentucky to agree to raise donations from fans at this spring’s Blue-White Game, raising almost $2,000 in an hour and a half.
The Fraternal Order of Police has raised money for Sanford. The police department has allowed him to work a desk job and given him a flexible schedule that allows him to make his chemo treatments. Lexington businessman Bill Morgan’s famous Poor Man’s Kentucky Derby Party this year included a silent auction for Kio Sanford.
For now, Sanford says doctors have told him his cancer is in remission.
“I’m glad, and I hope it stays that way,” he says. “But it’s like I’ve told people: With cancer, you can be in remission for a year, then all of a sudden it comes back. I just live day to day and pray to the man upstairs.”
Sanford has five chemotherapy treatments left.
Yet there is much to push him through these next months.
Recently, Jackie Grimes, the grandmother who basically raised Sanford, was pulling rose bushes in her yard.
“I thought, ‘If something happens to Kio, my life is over,’” Grimes says.
There is Jenny, the wife who has kept lists of appointments, kept notes from meetings with doctors, kept the household running when Kio is too weak to get out of bed.
“She knows more about what’s going on with me than I do,” Kio Sanford says. “She’s been great.”
And there is Cami, who knows Daddy is sick, but doesn’t yet understand the magnitude of cancer.
“I just continue on,” Kio says. “For my family, but especially for my daughter.”
For Kio Sanford, the struggle for life over death comes down to a simple truth:
You can’t quit.
(The Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader)
