TL;DR
- Kim and I have been married and building Mocoda together for more than thirty years. This spring she was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer.
- Our life turned over in about a week. We are facing it the way we’ve faced everything for three decades: together.
- Kim has her chemotherapy infusions at the cancer clinic in Huntsville. The short drive home, and the people there, matter more than I know how to say.
- Muskoka Algonquin Healthcare has proposed moving that clinic to Bracebridge, adding roughly an hour of round-trip driving on Highway 11, the only road there is.
- Our studio, Mocoda, built the Save Huntsville Cancer Clinic campaign site and runs its channels. This post is the part I couldn’t write in the studio’s voice.
- If you do one thing after reading this, please sign the petition.
Almost everything I’ve written on this blog has been about work: thirty years of managing projects, building Mocoda with Kim, learning where AI helps and where it doesn’t. This one is different. This one is about Kim.
Kim and I have been together for about as long as I’ve done anything. We started Mocoda in 1996, two people who loved building things, and we’ve spent more than thirty years making websites and apps for other people, side by side. She is my wife, my business partner, and the steadiest person I know. If you’ve ever worked with Mocoda, you’ve worked with Kim, whether you realized it or not.
This spring, our life turned over.
The week everything changed
In March, Kim found a lump. There was a biopsy in May, and on the fourteenth we got the words no one is ready for: invasive ductal carcinoma. A few weeks later a scan showed it had already spread to her bones. Stage 4. Metastatic. The kind they tell you they can treat but cannot cure.
I’m not going to pretend I have language for that stretch of days. Thirty years of running complex projects under real pressure taught me how to stay calm when the ground moves. None of it taught me this. You do not project-manage your way through your wife’s diagnosis. You hold on to each other and take the next right step, and then the one after that.
So that is what we are doing. Kim is on treatment now, and will be for the rest of her life: chemotherapy infusions, and hormone therapy after that, with no end date. It is a lot. Some days are hard in ways I won’t put on a public page. But if you know Kim, you know she is not facing this quietly, and she is not facing it alone. We have done everything together for three decades. We are doing this together too.
I’ve never believed in the kind of strength that means pretending you’re fine. The real kind is showing up for each other on the worst days and still finding something to laugh about by evening. We have a lot of practice at showing up. We are leaning on all of it.
Why the clinic matters to us
Which brings me to why I’m actually writing this.
Kim has her infusions at the cancer clinic in Huntsville. Her oncology team is in Barrie, but she moved her treatments closer to home, and it has made a real difference. Chemotherapy doesn’t hit you on a schedule; you don’t know how you’ll feel when you stand up from the chair. On the hard days, a drive home that is short instead of long is not a convenience. It is the line between manageable and unbearable. And the people at that clinic have cared for Kim in a way I don’t have a big enough word for. She’ll tell you herself that the place feels personal and the nurses are extraordinary. I have watched it up close. She’s right.
That clinic is now at risk. Muskoka Algonquin Healthcare has proposed moving the chemotherapy and infusion service out of Huntsville and into Bracebridge as part of a large hospital redevelopment. On paper it reads as consolidation. On the ground it means roughly an extra hour of round-trip driving for people in the middle of cancer treatment, on Highway 11, which is the only route and closes when it closes.
This is not a small or rare service. The Huntsville clinic delivered more than four thousand chemotherapy and infusion visits last year. It serves a catchment north of Huntsville of more than four thousand square kilometres and around sixty thousand year-round residents, many of whom already drive a long way to get there. Moving it does not trim a budget line. It takes away access, for the people least able to absorb the loss.
What I’m asking
The campaign to keep it is called Save Huntsville Cancer Clinic. Mocoda built its website, designed its identity, and runs its channels. I want to be honest about that: this is not a neutral client for us. We took it on because it is our neighbours, and because it is Kim. My studio wrote a good piece about how we built the campaign the right way, sourcing every number and keeping it credible. That is the professional half of the story. This post is the half I couldn’t write in the studio’s voice.
So here is what I’m asking.
If you’ve read this far, please sign the petition. It takes about a minute. If you have a few more, there is a letter you can send to the people making this decision; a note in your own words, saying where you live, carries real weight. The campaign is not against the new hospitals or the redevelopment. It supports both. It is asking for one decision, about where one service sits, to be looked at again before it is too late to change.
Kim and I have spent more than thirty years building things for other people. This is the most important thing we have ever asked people to help us build: a reason for the people who make this call to keep cancer care close to the families who depend on it.
Thank you for reading. And if you know Kim, you already know she’d tell me this post is too long and to get back to work. She’s probably right about that too.