Finding the Strength to Care
Beverly Kievman is an entrepreneur who is in the business of building businesses. She has helped women from India, New Zealand and Central America get their own enterprises off the ground. She has that wonderful kind of energy, enthusiasm and optimism that you need to bring something into existence.</br></br>People who have not had to deal with a long-term illness do not know what Beverly Kievman has gone through. Anyone who has been there does, and more and more of us are finding out every day what these illnesses do to the patient, and the family, financially and emotionally.</br></br>Kievman had the kind of double tragedy that would have felled a less resourceful-and balanced-person. Her husband, Michael, who was a senior executive vice president of Cox Broadcasting, was diagnosed as having diabetes five years after they were married. His first symptoms showed up when he began having trouble walking. Before he died three years ago, his circulation had become so bad that both of his legs were amputated.</br></br>"There were dozens of surgeries to try to save the legs," says Kievman. "He lost the first leg and went back to work. Eighteen months later he lost the second leg. He spent five weeks in intensive care, and nearly died."</br></br>During this same period, Kievman's mother was declining from Alzheimer's disease. Kievman, who lives in Atlanta, became the principal caretaker for both her husband and her mother. "During this time I continued being what we always were," she says, "a two-career couple." In addition to her business, Marketing Innovations Corp., she was trying to launch a new business and had raised and spent a half-million dollars on it.