A MOTHER’S Dream Colleen Drury loved to read, exercise, travel, cook and spend time with family and friends. The mother of four daughters — Nicole Cundiff, Danielle Kamm, Michelle Batschelet and Billie Drury — she and her husband raised their family in the Arcadia neighborhood and were active in the community and their girls’ lives. When their oldest, Nicole, was young, Colleen went back to Arizona State University to get a nursing degree. FOUR SISTERS UNITE TO FIGHT OVARIAN CANCER COVER STORY {by karen werner } Honoring the life of Colleen Drury ( above ), Colleen’s Dream was founded in 2012 by Nicole Cundiff and her husband, Billy, a 12-year veteran kicker in the NFL.

JANUARY 2020 | FRONTDOORS MEDIA 23 “It was cool to see her make sacrifices to not only care for us very well but to achieve her own dreams,” Nicole said. Colleen’s was a blessed life, spent tending to her close-knit family, enjoying her many friends and working with causes she cared about, like Easter Seals of Arizona and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. “Colleen was special,” said Nicole’s husband, Billy Cundiff. “She was truly the life of the party in a very positive way.” So when Colleen started experiencing physical discomfort in 2007, no one imagined it was anything dire. She chalked the symptoms up to hitting her 50s and scheduled checkups with several doctors. But the symptoms started to mount. “I remember when I moved home from Texas, we had to stop almost every hour for her to go to the bathroom,” Nicole said. Colleen went from doctor to doctor, looking for a reason for her afflictions, but they couldn’t find one. “She told them what she was experiencing and how uncomfortable she was. Her gastroenterologist scheduled a colonoscopy, but they couldn’t perform the test because there was an obstruction. And then her gynecologist tried to perform an internal exam and she jumped off the table. But that didn’t trigger anything for them,” Nicole said. “They sent her home and said, ‘We’ll try again in a few months.’” Meanwhile, Colleen became bloated. “She looked five months pregnant and could hardly walk,” Michelle said. Things came to a head during a rafting trip down to the Grand Canyon. “She had a distended belly and couldn’t eat,” Billie said. Finally, a family friend recognized that this was a problem beyond menopause and said, “We need to check you out. Please meet me at the hospital.” They ran a gamut of tests — a CA-125 blood test, an MRI, a CAT scan — and they had their diagnosis. It was ovarian cancer, the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths among women in the United States. At the time of Colleen’s diagnosis, the family didn’t know about ovarian cancer, even though Colleen was a nurse and had worked on what is now the oncology floor at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Together, in celebration of their mom, Colleen ( middle ), Michelle Batschelet, Nicole Cundiff, Billie Drury and Danielle Kamm support Arizona’s leading ovarian cancer nonprofit.